Summary
I tried, and failed, to love this game
The Good
I’m a big fan of casual games, and a big fan of indie games. I was thus surprised to find this game is critically acclaimed as I’d never heard of it before.
The game is freeware, which results in a swift download, installation and away you go. It is made using Multimedia Fusion, so it’s not my place to complain about the graphics in comparison to Far Cry 2, Crysis etc. With the tools at hand the designers have created a charming looking world, with nice and extremely varied character models and locations.
But what a horrible world Mia, the protagonist, lives in! Ignore the cutsie graphics, even the adora-fascist robot enemies, and you’re treated to a world of slavery, implied rape (Mia has a half-robot half-brother, presumably as a result of her mother’s enslavement to a robot overlord. Ew.) and environmental destruction. Nearly everything in the world is hostile to you, even tiny dudes riding leaves nonchalantly through the air. Literally one of the only non-NPC creatures that doesn’t immediately try to kill you is a frog sitting on a signpost. I shot at it a few times just to make sure.
To a certain degree this adds to your involvement (see bellow) in this world. One of my favorite touches comes after crossing your first major obstacle- a large forest full of serial-killer frogs and mushrooms. When you finally reach the sanctuary of a peaceful settlement you’re greeted by a dead frog stung up on a post. Cool.
This element of maturity is the money-shot of the game, and is pretty much the only thing that justifies its existence.
The Bad
I’d advise you not to look at the screenshot of the ‘GAME OVER’ screen as it’ll reveal about 60% of your playing experience. This is because death truly is a companion in this game. Some sequences, and bare in mind I’ve only played this about a third of the way through, are just so frustrating, so nefariously laid out, that I gave up on the game to attempt another time when the bloodthirsty rage had died down.
There’s just too many ways to die. Enemies come at you with an extremely short time to react, often with you having to perform several different actions. Jump, duck, jump and avoid flying eyeball but land and duck before the cat shoots you, jump and hit the cat. Duck. Jump. Die. Die. DIE!
Jumping isn’t just a pixel-perfect affair but a pressure-perfect one as well. The distance you jump is apparently affected by how hard you press the key, but you’ll get different results constantly, sending you plummeting to a terrifying death in the hands of midget mushroom men. In addition the player character’s head is enormous and her attack is made at chest level. A flying creature can (and frequently does) fly just above or below your attack and skim the top of your head, killing you easily.
Each scene will see you die about three times before you understand how you’re meant to proceed, die about twenty times trying to pass the obstacle, then die another twenty times when you come across the equally difficult section following.
All this would have been negated if you had the ability to save your game manually, just like PC players have been able to do for at least a decade and a half. Unfortunately the save points are placed massively far apart. Simply putting more save points would negate the need for my last four paragraphs.
I said I wasn’t going to criticise the music or graphics, but on full screen the pixels are the size of bunny rabbits. Presumably this is a limitation of the engine, but it’s bloody hard to look at for too long without going ape-shiz. Similarly challenged is the midi-alike music. It’s reasonably good, but so, so repetitive, especially whenever it restarts upon loading the game after your 10,000th death.
Loading a game from the GAME OVER screen is far too slow given its frequency in use. You just want to jump right back into the game again, not watch Mia wonder around a blank interface. Your saved profiles don’t tell you where the save point is either, which often results in guesswork.
As an irritating counter to my earlier comment about the variation of the world I’d like to point out something that’s been bugging me. There’s significant attachment lost in a world that has walking mushrooms one minute, gun-toting robots the next, flying eyeballs and fire-breathing cats another time. I mean the design ethic operates only slightly above some early nineties platformer. If this is meant to be one coherent world, particularly one that deals with such serious themes, then a bit of justification for its diverse and homicidal inhabitants wouldn’t go amiss.
The Bottom Line
It's hard to pick this game apart because of the obvious amount of time and love put into it by the creators. The story itself is enough to convince many to continue playing, but I just don't have the time or patience to deal with such unforbidding gameplay. I hope others enjoy it more.
