Release: 2014
Genre: Third person, Adventure, Programming, Puzzle?
Gameplay Stats: 3 hours, 3/4 Acts
I know what you're thinking... Ryan, why does your gameplay stats section look like you haven't finished the game? I thought these reviews were about you finishing games and then providing thoughts? Well, I haven't finished the game. I very likely will not finish the game. However, I have thoughts that I would like to express about it and I'd still like to do that.
Visuals: This is a game with pretty stylized visuals, which is pretty cool! The objects have a tendency to mask their actual shapes with stylized edges and overlaps, but that's something to be expected from any game with a highly stylized art direction. That being said, at some point in the story, you are able to see objects more for their actual shape and the game benefits with this overlay. I'll get into this a bit more later.
Audio: The music in this game is pretty charming! I thought it did a good job expressing the tone while keeping the player engaged. Additionally, I think that the sound effects are brilliant, even if they could have used a bit more variation.
Plot: The plot here is mostly standard fare. The general, 'evil guy is trying to control the world' sort of trope that you find in many Zelda and other adventure titles. The twits here is that you character strikes back, not with violence, but with his programming skills and ability to hack most everything in the world around him. As you continue through the game, you strip away most of the stylized graphics and get at the underlying code. This is a neat conceit! But it leads me into my other criticisms...
Gameplay: The overall gameplay, the adventure gameplay, is great! It's about as tight as it needs to be, and I don't remember anything other than the menus that could have used some serious work. The programming portion of the game is lacking in my opinion. There is no tutorialization in the game apart from how to move and swing the sword and all that. When you swing the usb sword, it brings up a table of values and you have to alter them to change the very nature of what it is that you're interacting with. As an example, you can hack an enemy to make them heal you when they attack you, or you can make them ambivalent to your presence.
This game made me rage. I don't know that this is evident in what I've written, but it really did. In act 3 in the game, the player is supposed to know how to read and edit Lua code without any sort of tutorial that might explain this to the player, or any sort of reference that you might be able to look into to learn the requisite skills. The game doesn't even directly tell you that the code is in Lua! When you alter something, a transparent text pop-up says blahblahblah.lua was saved. I've had some experience programming in C and Java before (although it's been a while), but I couldn't parse a lot of what was there. The way the code is presented is abstracted, so instead of using logic to infer what a line means, you have to trace colored lines around similar to a circuit diagram. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I strongly disliked this game. It was a GREAT premise, but nowhere does the game teach what it expects you to know. This brings to my mind a question of who the intended audience is of the game. People who know how to program could very well find the little coding infantile, but people who don't know won't find this to be an adequate teaching tool. Maybe if you play this as you're learning Lua, it would be ideal. 3/10
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