A few games that weren’t terrible but left me underwhelmed. Inside: The Bridge, F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch, TetherGeist demo, Threadbound demo
The Bridge
Puzzle
A 2D physics puzzler with the gimmick that each room can be fully rotated, with gravity changing accordingly. It’s an interesting concept but I found the execution frustrating. In addition to my usual dislike for physics puzzlers, everything is just so slow. Your character walks at a crawl and it takes ages to rotate the room; you even fall slowly. With how many late-game puzzles require walking the entire length of the level, it just felt like padding. Additionally, while the hand-drawn graphical style looks very nice, it makes it very difficult to discern hitboxes, which is a problem when determining the exact edges of platforms is really important.
I didn’t finish this one; after you beat all the levels the game goes “Surprise, that was actually only half the game! Do all the levels again but now they’re way harder!” and just, no.
F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch
Metroidvania
Furry cyberpunk Metroidvania where the furries have been conquered by evil Japanese robots. You fight with a refurbished mecha fist (and, later, other weapons). The gameplay is decent but had some issues — in particular, a core gameplay mechanic is performing a finishing move on near-dead enemies, but enemy health is not shown nor is whatever metric is used to determine the stagger window (sometimes I would kill enemies regularly without the option ever coming up, so it’s clearly determined by something other than just damage, but I dunno what). Probably the biggest issue is that the game adheres to a pretty strict and linear plot, which is obviously a poor fit for a Metroidvania — not only are you rarely given a chance to explore the map organically, it’s also pretty severe ludonarrative dissonance to be constantly poking around the map looking for secrets while being told you’re on a super tense time-sensitive mission.
This might be forgivable if the plot was any good, but it isn’t. The furries treat the robots like objects despite them clearly being sapient, and halfway through you murder the Black-coded (and disabled) gang boss because he wants the same thing as you but is doing it the wrong way, which makes him ~crazy and evil~. We cap this off by murdering the cyborg who wants to make everyone cyborgs, because transhumanism is evil. There is also exactly one woman, who dresses in skintight clothing, fights with sexy kicks, and spends the entire game getting leered at by your sidekick. The art style is also a baffling choice — everything is fully 3D modeled with absurd detail even though the game is entirely 2D, which leads to bizarre level design full of paths into the background and foreground that we can never interact with, and a lot of difficulty distinguishing interactable terrain from the background. The hyper-realistic 3D models are also uncanny with the furry characters, who all have fully human hands like Bojack Horseman characters. (This is what allows us to see that the gang boss is the only character with dark skin.)
TetherGeist Demo
Precision Platformer
A pixel art precision platformer starring a red-haired woman who can air-dash (i.e., a Celeste-like). The central mechanic works a bit differently than an air dash: You eject your spirit from your body and then teleport to it when you release the button, but you can freely move the spirit within a certain distance, allowing you to move around obstacles. The most significant difference from Celeste, however, is that this ability does not regenerate automatically: To use it, you must collect powerups scattered around the stage, with different powerups giving you different abilities. I found this much more punishing than Celeste, since if you mess up even once in the middle of a sequence, you can’t recover since you no longer have the resources needed to finish. It’s also a very poor fit with the town exploration section, which forces you to walk for ages through trivial platforming challenges to replenish your powerups. (The town section in general was also extremely bad at signposting which platforms were solid; everything looks like it’s on the same plane, so there’s no clear indication of what is and isn’t interactive.) In addition, I experienced some pretty bad slowdown and screen tearing in certain areas; hopefully that will get fixed later.
I found the story to be a very odd fit for the gameplay. It does a similar disability narrative to Celeste, but swaps out a mental disability for a physical one, which changes the ludonarrative synergy in some really awkward ways. The challenge and relentless pace of Celeste fits well with the story about overcoming depression and anxiety by pushing yourself to succeed; here, it just feels like I’m torturing the disabled protagonist by pushing her body beyond what it can handle. Even the mechanic of “Welp, I messed up so I’ll just die to reset” fit better in Celeste where the idea was you can always try again and do things at your own pace; here it feels like punishing your body for failing you, especially since the powerup mechanic makes failures much more common. Even though the player behavior and gameplay loop are exactly the same, what felt positive and healthy with Celeste‘s framing now feels disturbing and unhealthy. The opening also says the other kids see the protagonist as inspiration porn, which the protagonist does not push back against at all. Yes, we’ve only seen the opening so far, but I do have to wonder if they’re actually going to examine that?
(Additionally, the game plans to have accessibility options like Celeste, but they’re not in the demo. Boy howdy, is that environmental storytelling if I ever saw it.)
Threadbound Demo
Puzzle Platformer
Puzzle platformer with the gimmick that you can bind the X and Y positions of certain objects to each other. This is initially simple things like a block that moves when you push another block, but quickly evolves into complex webs with multiple connections, like binding your own position to two platforms at once or tying an object’s X to its own Y, etc. This is an interesting concept, but I found the later puzzles too confusing and difficult for me. I overall feel that there is too much platforming in this puzzle; there are several puzzles where you have to perform quick inputs at precise times, and the context-sensitive jump height combined with puzzles related to your own Y position leads to situations where it’s very difficult to get the right height. It gives me a similar sense to most physics puzzlers, where I can’t tell if I have the right solution and just can’t execute it correctly or if I have the wrong solution entirely.
The game world is also structured like a Metroidvania, with a series of interconnected rooms you can freely travel between, which I feel is a poor fit for a puzzle game. There were a few times where I got confused about which puzzles and routes I had already done, and which places were optional side rooms and which were part of the critical path. The map does at least keep track of where the collectibles are, but if I was getting this lost in the demo I doubt I would fare well in the full game.
The furry characters were cute though.