Recent reviews by Cale Hornford

With this new direction in mind I went out to find a game released this week that would be a great example of what I’m talking about above. I managed to find one in celestial hacker girl jessica from gamewright princess and their studio The Lonliest Pixel. This game is a 3D platformer, specifically the rarely explored marbe exploration sub-genre. It’s reminiscent of Marble Blast, which is probably best remembered as a pre-installed goodie on mid 2000s iMacs. For those not familiar with the sub genre, these games are usually level based, but minimalist in level and visual design. These games are typically the purest of pure 3d platformers.They succeed in creating compelling game design by making the goals and tools available to the players perfectly clear at all times. The player can only roll around in so many directions and tasks demanded of the player are straightforward, reach this goal, collect these five coins, etc…

But look at the very first landscape celestial hacker girl jessica offers to the player.

There’s no wide shot showing an overview of the level, no slow paced one level at a time introduction of mechanics. In this first level there’s already locked areas, computer terminals, interactive objects that do things, some that don’t, freestanding spheres of water where gravity doesn’t hinder you, and at least one open flame. And if the player falls off the world there’s a rainbow coloured skeleton that reaches out and catches them, causing them to explode in its palm.

celestial hacker girl jessica lacks a cohesion to its world. And that’s understandable considering most of the assets in the game come from the Unity Asset Store. celestial hacker girl jessica feels like a game fashioned like a collage, with bits of magazine clippings held together with a glue stick. Individual objects stick out awkwardly from the world around them. And I don't mean that in a neggative way. It gives the strong impression that every asset was chose from a myriad of choices, and thus every asset is important and reflective of the work or creator.

For celestial hacker girl jessica, this serves the purpose of the game’s design. Compared to the games with which it shares some amount of design DNA, celestial hacker girl jessica is more of a puzzle game. It often teases the player with a level’s end goal kept behind an impenetrable wall. Actual dexterity or mobility challenges aren’t all that common in the game compared to its more puzzle based elements. Like individual parts of complex machinery, each part of the game’s puzzles function in predictable ways. And the varied visual elements draw attention to each element of its puzzles. The artificiality of the levels is clear so the player can read each element of the puzzle clearly, letting them solve puzzles with relative ease once they’ve been correctly parsed.

celestial hacker girl jessica offers a selection of extra collectibles to find strewn about its levels. New marble skins, music from the soundtrack to play on demand, entries to warpzones. These bring an added depth to the game and its puzzles. Often these are hidden in subtle hidden corners of levels, other times in places that require using puzzle elements in original ways. One level has a section where the player is required to hop through floating spheres of water to reach the platform with the end goal. Or they can use the water to line up a spot to drop straight down, falling to their death but collecting an extra collectible for their efforts. This kind of thinking is very rewarding to the player because they’ll feel clever for learning a puzzle, and then cleverer still for learning how to manipulate that solution to achieve extra side goals.

Just getting through levels of celestial hacker girl jessica isn’t the greatest challenge, warp zones are plentiful so if the player wants to make a beeline to the end the game doesn’t get in their way. A lot of what makes the work successful is its ability to cater to multiple levels of play. It works for those looking for a quick puzzle game, but also to completionists willing to sniff around every one of its highly artificial corners, and also to anyone in between.

Legacy of the Elder Star’s (LotES) main feature has to be it’s mouse based control scheme. All of its mechanics, scoring systems and design decisions are based on this idea that the player’s character is fixed permanently to the player’s mouse cursor. Mouse based control schemes aren’t exactly rare in scrolling shmups (particularly on PC ports), but LotES’s execution of it is. Frantic, an old flash shmup I played often back in the day and Jamestown: Legacy of the Lost Colony, a game I’ve written about before on this blog are both examples of shmups with mouse control. But they are examples of the way mouse control is usually implemented. There the mouse pointer and the player’s ship are seperate entities, as the pointer serves as the point where the ship will slowly move towards. Like the ship and pointer are attached by an elastic band that stretches and then pulls the entities together. This makes sense for games where the player can choose between button or mouse controls. As this elastic method of control better emulates how the nature of buttons dictate a set speed for ship movement.

But LotES is totally different, by gluing the player’s ship to the mouse cursor the speed limit is erased. The ship’s maneuverability is limited only by the player’s dexterity of the mouse. With a little practice, that mouse dexterity is going to dwarf the maneuverability the buttons, which in turn vastly increases the player’s survivability. I would suspect that if one were to transplant LotES’s control scheme into most other shmups the games would simply break. Mouse control makes it far too easy to dodge bullets with a precision buttons largely can’t. I know this sounds like the tired old kbm vs gamepad debate, but in this case it’s just fact that dodging is that much easier with mouse control.

But how does LotES compensate for this extreme survivability? It’s not by becoming a bullet hell game. At no point does LotES throw the amount of projectiles at the player that a game like Ikaruga does. Plus LotES gives its players an extremely generous amount of invulnerability in the form of a secondary weapon. The player starts the game with a dash ability that lets, them phase through bullets and enemies, even killing them in the process. Waves and waves of bullets would be simply dashed through, rendering them harmless, so bullet hell isn’t the answer. Does the game give the player little room for error, punishing death harshly? Well, it’s no to that as well. The player gets to take 5 whole hits before they actually “die”, not that death hurts much in the story mode. Upon death the player can instantly respawn losing only their super meter and the combo multiplier, but not any progress. Bosses still have the damage taken during the previous life, the same enemies are dead, etc. Upon choosing LotES, Videogame Lookclub curator Jay Tholen suggested setting a cap of ten deaths to create some amount of tension. But that doesn’t actually tackle the survivability problem. It’s not a restriction that forces the player to approach the game’s best facets.

It’s important to remember that like so many shmups, LotES is a points and leaderboard based game. Games of that ilk can coerce the player into player a particular way by rewarding players more points for certain actions or specific kinds of play. Many shmups reward players for not dying, building big combos or finishing under a certain time. But LotSE rewards players for playing recklessly. The weapons in LotSE, be it the machine gun or the shotgun or whatever do more damage, build more super meter and score more points at point blank range. Without the point system, it makes far more sense to hang back on the safest edges of the screen. But with it, the player is compelled to close those gaps and situate themselves directly in front of the enemies. Here they climb the leaderboard more quickly, but they risk sudden attacks or colliding into enemies, costing lives.

This is a natural push pull, that creates stellar dissonance in the player. They must balance the natural urge to retreat to safety with the greedy need to achieve those higher and higher ranks. It’s an incredibly elegant to the game’s survivability problem. Playing this way encourages learning, memorizing and reading enemy behaviour to find safe times to dodge in. But then the player’s attention is drawn away from sliding through bullets and towards the enemy, potentially earning them more deaths. And deaths brings the score multiplier back to zero, limiting how high that run will score on the leaderboard.

And the real great bit is how this all reflects back on LotSE’s mouse control. In a vacuum they seem primarily driven to allow the player maximum survivability through unimpeded movement. But understanding how the point blank mechanics works, the player understands that the dexterous control isn’t about surviving at all. No, the player’s extreme speed exists for the opposite, to play as aggressively as possible. The precise mouse control lets the player dive in and out of their opponents faces. Moving through bravely creating destruction, not hiding in the safest corners of the playspace.

And what a brilliant moment that realization is. For me it came after several complete runs of the story mode. I couldn’t wrap my head around how some of the bonus objectives like “fire the super attack three times in one level” was even possible. But when the cohesiveness of the games’ clicks, it’s a complete eureka moment. My first several runs after realizing the function of the system saw my scores skyrocket, and my enjoyment totally matched.

LotSE has an incredibly holistic design that completely understands how shmups can benefit from being designed centrally for the PC instead of being mere ports of arcade games. The only problem with LotSE is that it’s brilliance is very tightly tied to the idea of leaderboards and high scores. If you’re the kind of videogame player that doesn’t care for that kind of motivation, there isn’t much left in LotSE to compel play. I mentioned Ikaruga above, and that’s a game that feels enjoyable to simply play and overcome as a singular challenge in a way LotSE can't. This is a game that really relies on high score chasing, simply “finishing” it may not prove sufficiently compelling for some.

So it’s a shame that the game isn’t more popular than it is. For leaderboards to work there needs to be high scores to chase. LotSE wasn’t a big hit and the attention of the gaming world largely passed it by. I for one had never heard about it before it’s selection for Videogame Lookclub. None of my steam friends own a copy, my friends leaderboard is empty except for my entry. And of the last seven daily challenges, I’ve placed first worldwide in five of them. All of my victories were scores left uncontested, leaving me first and last on the leaderboard. Which is a shame, because LotSE is about as good as PC native shooters ever get. In both design and execution, the game has very few peers.

In my playthrough of Zombi the world was saved by Jasper Cooper, a career general manager who succeeded in delivering the newly minted zombie vaccine to those who could make use of it. But Cooper was only the anchor in a relay of survivors who contributed to that success. Cooper merely picked up the proverbial baton from the border guard Zara Griffiths. To acquire said vaccine, Griffiths had infiltrated the former living quarters of the Queen of England, only to later fall mere meters from escaping and reaching the game’s end credits. Cooper’s contribution was pretty light in comparison to Griffiths’, he merely had to courier the vaccine to the waiting escape helicopter. But thinking back, Griffiths’ role was likely less crucial than the policewoman who crisscrossed London to find the vaccine’s formula or less crucial still than the janitor who found the nail bat, the game’s most useful weapon.

Success in Zombi is something that is passed from one character to the next. Every time a player character dies, the player must guide a new avatar back to the recently deceased one, kill it and loot their important items back. After which the new survivor can continue on as if no death had ever took place. Mission items, gun upgrades, and backpack upgrades all carry over to the next interchangeable player character. It’s a true team effort, but this is where Zombi gets thematically indecisive. Because simultaneously Zombi tries to be the ultimate conspiracy theorist/prepper fantasy. And it can’t have it both ways as the game’s plot argues for lone wolf isolationism while all its mechanical design emphasizes the collective power of the many.

Zombi is pretty clear about its plot being rooted in prepper culture, a lifestyle (hobby? subculture?) centered on being prepared for impending disastrous events. For many this is merely a “better safe than sorry” approach for being able to withstand events that are nearly guaranteed to happen at some point, hurricanes, blizzards, power outages. Others take this to the extreme, these are the people preparing for an imminent end of the world or total collapse of civilization due to political crisis, nuclear war or in the case of Zombi a medical outbreak of some kind of super plague.

Zombi largely centers around one of these doomsday preppers. The player is constantly directed over the radio by a man named John, but who calls himself quite literally “The Prepper”. Preparation is John’s central tenant, every time a player assumes a new avatar they wake up in John’s safe house and the very first thing he asks them is “Are you prepared?” Through John, the game uses a lot of prepper culture terminology and concepts, for example referring to the backpack as a bug-out bag. Zombi represents a kind of the ultimate prepper fantasy. Through their own foresight and cunning, only the prepared can be relied on to save the day when the ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan. This idea is that having a fully stocked bag will allow one to raid some of the most heavily guarded places on earth and survive odds that kill 99% of other people. The game plays into the idea that when things go bad there exists a kind of person tough enough and prepared enough to not only outlast all other individuals, but communities at large.

But the game’s depiction of a collapsing society doesn’t reflect about what we know about how groups react to traumatic events. When hurricanes swept through the Gulf Coast last year you saw people driving towards the disaster with boats to help, not the other way around. Resources get stretched and shared amongst those who need it. Disasters have a way of bringing cities together in ways few other events can. But in Zombi, helping others just gets people killed. The secret society of the Ravens who exist to prevent the plague are comically inept (except for their safe houses that were built by John “The Prepper” himself). Vikram’s attempt to care for his zombified wife gets him infected and sees him kill and try to eat his own son. The children in the nursery were supposed to be protected by the staff but they seem to have burned to death, their resting place disturbed by some unexplained ghost zombie.

Zombi’s seeming celebration of the anti-social and conservative high horse traits of prepper culture could be tolerable if not for this repetitive moral that helping others is bad. It’s a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ thematic core of a work in that it’s simply untrue to human nature. As outlined earlier, the game’s daisy chain of survivors creates a great sense of collaboration. This is true of the zombies as well, even the strongest boss zombie is easily dispatched with the starter equipment but even two basic zombies that attack together end up killing the player very quickly The gameplay design of Zombi is clearly an argument that groups of people can be greater than the sum of their parts. So there is a direct conflict between the game’s plot, the details in its setting and the message imparted on the player through play. Yet I wouldn’t go so far to say the mechanical design is meant to refute its plot’s themes and arguments. If the game was confidently trying to support collaboration Vikram wouldn’t have eaten his kid’s face.

Well, it should be said that this is only true of Zombi’s normal mode. But there is another mode in the game, survival mode. In survival mode there is no relay of survivors, no baton of loot that one survivor carries forward from their predecessor. When the player avatar dies in survival mode it’s an instant game over, end of story. The game’s producer Guillaume Brunier goes so far as to call survival mode the way Zombi was meant to be played. But without the game’s collaborative elements the game loses its conflicted messaging. It becomes the simple, prepper fantasy the plot thinks it is. Those who prepared will prosper, and those who don’t will suffer. People survive entirely on their own merits, happenstance is irrelevant or meaningless. In this harder mode, John “The Prepper” is just someone who’s advice is always right, while in normal mode it’s a point of view the player can take or leave based on their gameplay experience.

And that’s the core Zombi’s dissonance, is it a game that supports or condemns helping others? But that question completely fails at creating intriguing or compelling thought. We know that people collaborate, we know that people help each other even in the most dire of situations. For most this isn’t a even an off hand question worth pondering over, let alone one to hinge the entire text the size of a AAA videogame on. It’s only a debate for those already itching to leave others out in the cold.

Because Zombi’s plot seems to lack any real grasp on the game’s interesting indecision, I can only be left to think its presence is simply accidental. That in the quest to make a fun silly launch game for the WiiU, game directors Jean Philippe Caro and Florent Sacré created something that doesn’t even bother to explore human nature. This is more abundantly clear playing Zombi’s PC version, which lacks the physical novelties of ZombiU’s use of the WiiU gamepad. So, five years later there is little reason to come back to Zombi, unless you’re that person with a fallout shelter who can’t wait for the day everyone else is dead.

Rex: Another Island is the opening selection in the Jay Tholen curated videogame club, Videogame Lookclub. And it’s a good first pick, for in many ways the game itself is a great example of an artist starting out. Like so many of the creators you can find on alternative game sites like Itch or Game Jolt, Rex: Another Island’s gamewright Shysaursoft is just starting out a gamemaker. Shysaur considers Rex: Another Island their first real game release, and the game shows that in the kind of quirks very commonly found in first projects. But I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, Rex: Another Island has a level of execution higher than just about any first project you’re likely to find. Sure, Rex: Another Island can seem like yet another 2d pixel platformer at times, but there is a real ambition there so rarely found in first projects.

One of those rules of thumb often passed around to new game devs is that they should always reduce the scope of their games, and then reduce it again. But that doesn’t seem to have been a lesson to have made it to Shysaursoft. Rex: Another Island’s signature feature is it’s large singular open level. From starting area to finish door, the entire games takes place on one large map. Different “levels” such as the caves, the forest or the lighthouse are found one after another or even situated on top of each other. It would have been far more manageable to craft all these levels as wholly separate entities, but instead Shysaur sought out to bring an entire island to life. This creates a much stronger sense of continual progression, making the game feel far grander than its 90 minute runtime would normally mean.

The game would feel a lot smaller if these sections were split across a level select screen, smaller and less cohesive to be sure. And that would have been the understandable approach for a first time gamewright but I don’t think the game would work if Shysaur had settled for that. Rex: Another Island would lose its steadily growing tempo of exploration if split up. Rex: Another Island’s isn’t laid out as densely than say, a metroidvania. For the most part it presents its levels one after another with only so many branching paths. With more practice I would encourage Shysaur to find a way for their next project to feature more paths or routes between different sections. Rex: Another Island’s collection mechanics encourage a thorough combing of each area, as is the player comes to a lot of dead ends requiring warping back to the main paths. If the world was more layered over itself the game could have a much more organic flow to the exploration.

The aforementioned collection focus is the other pillar to Rex: Another Island’s design. The game doesn’t technically require the player to seek out any of it’s collectibles to reach a completion screen, but the game would be pretty dull without it. The levels are full of coins and other secrets to collect, finding them can open up secret endings and push players towards the game’s most interesting platforming challenges. Death strips the player of any coins they’ve collected but the world is full of checkpoints where players can bank any coins they have on them, safeguarding them on future deaths. If Rex: Another Island, has an achilles heel it would be this banking mechanic. As is, it encourages the player to constantly backtrack or fast travel to save points every time they pick up any coins that are even somewhat tricky to pick up. Not only is this back-and-forth monotonous, it means the player rarely has any meaningful stake at any one specific moment.

Rex: Another Island shines more and more as the player carriers more and more coins, when death can be a real setback. But the player has to fight against the mechanics encouraging them to backtrack to feel this. The game relies a lot on the thrill of exploration of its world, but the desire to push forward and seeing the next room is at constant odds against the incentive to trek backwards to avoid losing coins. There is a high score system that rewards banking as rarely as possible but it’s not really highlighted in game, nor is there any in-game thing to do with that point total. Some additional perks like unlockables here could do Rex: Another Island wonders by incentivizing playing the game the way that suits it best. Also of help would be more level design that prevents backtracking. Pushing the player forward for a set amount of screens can discourage the player from conservative play by showing off the thrill of risk and greed.

So while not faultless, Rex: Another Island is better than any first game project has any right to be. At its core it’s simply a good, well controlling 2D platformer that can be great at times if you’re willing to meet it halfway. Approach the game in its more flattering ways and you’ve got something that stand a couple steps above the mass of retro styled platformers. Rex: Another Island’s missteps are forgivable thanks to successes elsewhere and in my opinion, the developer’s lack of experience. The project suggests Shysaur has a potentially bright future as a gamewright.

Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony is caught between new and old ways of thinking about shmups. The game is obviously heavily influenced by arcade shmups dating back to the turn of the millennium. Cave’s Progear has been cited by the dev team as a particularly strong influence, but larger elements of Cave and Treasure’s house styles have also been found. But Jamestown tries to go in creative directions most arcade shmups don’t, with mixed results.

The shooting in Jamestown works, although it’s more mechanically simple than a lot of shmups. The player can choose a ship before starting a level from four different options, this choice is then locked for the duration of a level. This means a commitment is made by the player to execute an entire level in one particular style for its duration. This makes Jamestown a less dynamic shmup than other franchises like Raiden with its scaling/switching weapons or an Ikargua with its phase switching. In its place Jamestown has a bullet absorption mechanic in Vault that rewards players with points. It’s less exciting to play, but timing of Vault brings a tactical level of score building to Jamestown that other shmups lack. Jamestown’s mechanical design encourages the player to replay levels in order to determine when/where is best to use Vault. Success on the leaderboard isn’t tied to level clearing so much as clearing levels efficiently. Jamestown’s mechanical simplicity encourages the player to master level planning, not reflexive skill to get good. Ikaruga has some of this with its combo mechanic, but that game’s difficulty keeps the player more focused on the actual “playing” than Jamestown’s memorization focus.

Jamestown gets away with a tactical approach because it’s positioned differently from the classic arcade games that inspired it. Unlike most shmups, Jamestown was designed from the ground up as a home release. As you can replay levels instantly without paying new quarters each time the player can change, and improve their strategy gradually with practice. In an arcade game this would feel like a cheap grab for more coins.

Jamestown doesn’t go far enough though in benefiting from its home platform. If you play the story on either the “normal” or “difficult” difficulty setting you’ll learn the end of the game is only present on the higher difficulty settings, without any warning before hand. And this isn’t just a secret ending, start on “normal” and you’ll find 60% through the game that you have to start all over at the beginning on “difficult” is you want to continue. Same with that difficulty level 80% through the game. Having started on the first difficulty level, I was force to play through the front half three entire times to get to the final level, it’s a cheap way to artificially pad out a shorter game. This means the player will spend more time re-playing the easy, less interesting levels over and over. The game is structured to show the player its duller side more often than its more exciting content, a baffling decision that can make this game awful dull to slog through.

This also totally breaks the difficulty curve. Playing through the game the third time on “legendary” is still quite easy as so much of the difficulty in Jamestown is based on memorizing enemy placement and attack patterns. The player learns these things the first two times through the game, making the third pass very easy until they arrive at the final level. Playing an unseen level on “legendary” is much harder than doing it with practice, creating a massive difficulty spike right at the end of the game that ruins the established flow. The problem isn’t that the game gets hard, it’s that the game’s structure masks the difficulty before turning it on all at once.

As is Jamestown’s multiple modes don’t contribute to each other at all. It feels as if the game’s tried to include all the variations you would find in home releases of arcade games. While I always appreciate more modes, the game refuses to let them interact in any way. This makes sense for a home port, where they are fluffing up a short experience. But Jamestown is a home release and these modes could very easily be integrated into a more cohesive whole. The challenge mode or gauntlet mode should be incorporated right into the campaign as a means to unlock the later levels. Replaying so much of this game over and over is a weird decision. Jamestown ends up feeling like less of a love letter to classic shmups, but more of a tribute to their awkward home ports. Ports that much like Jamestown, show off the worst parts of the games proudly.

///Spoilers follow for the entirety of Binary Domain.

Binary Domain doesn’t really get started until the flashback cutscene in the middle of the first chapter. Before that, the game is largely concerned with tutorialization and basic character introduction, the game starts without any substantial plot or intrigue. After said cutscene, Binary Domain is a game about a world of doubt, distrust and second guessing. A world where some people aren’t in fact people but unwittingly cyborgs created for purposes they nor the audience will ever know. It’s a powerful hook, and instantly becomes the lens with which how the player sees the setting and its denizens. Binary Domain isn’t a game with an array of thematic cores, it has just this one. You might be a robot, your friends might be robots, anyone at all might be a robot. Even the president’s personal military advisor was unknowingly a robot and had to be neutralized in the situation room. If Binary Domain wanted to be a game about more than just this, it would have had to introduce themes before this plot twist, because it’s a big enough detail that it’s the lens that colours everything that comes after it.

After the player learns of this secret robot premise it’s hard not to look at everything in Binary Domain under the assumption that someone will turn out to be a cyborg in the end. It’s a kind of Chekov’s Gun principle, a natural trope of storytelling that is well trodden enough that people will pick up on it right away. I think it’s a fair assumption that most players will come out of the flashback thinking “Ok, clearly someone important in this game is a robot, let’s try to figure it out.”

This makes Binary Domain into a kind of passive mystery game on top of being a third-person shooter. Regardless of their original intent, every event, character or even game mechanic gets put through the “Are they a robot,” ringer. For example when meeting Faye the player thinks, “This Chinese sniper showed up all alone saying her friends died on the way over, is that true or is that something a robot would say to cover.” And it can go on and on, the player can and will second guess just about everything under this examination. “Is this point-based character trust system a way for my potentially robot self to emulate human relationships.” “Am I nicknamed “The Survivor” because I survived near death experiences in the past or because I’m a robot that can be brought back to life if I die.”

Binary Domain starts to suffer here because its mechanics and narrative beats can’t bear the weight of the player’s constant scrutiny. Take the voiced dialogue system for example, when it works (If it works…) it can produce moments of real intimacy between the characters and the player. But the system isn’t going to tell you if anyone is a robot or not, it’s just a neat way to make the characterization of Dan and his squad mates more immersive. But the structure of the game’s twists doesn’t encourage the player to revel in that immersiveness, it encourages them to be playing detective and analyze every word choice of theirs. The player can’t regularly make bonds with their squad mates when the premise of the game’s plot puts walls between them instead.

In the end Binary Domain’s greatest problem is that there’s no answer to its Chekov Gun premise. In the end no one turns out to be a robot, or at least not in the way the game set them up in the flashback cutscene back at the start of the game. One of the player’s squad does turn out to be a human-robot hybrid, a concept introduced very late into the game. But no one of much importance turns out to be a robot as depicted back in the first chapter. It’s a twist that quite frankly doesn’t make much sense, even for a game where nothing seemed to follow much logic to begin with. Regardless, its the betrayal of Binary Domain’s soft mystery that ultimately sinks the game. The game’s narrative wants you to be on the hunt for hidden robots, and its systems and mechanics skirt that line for enough of the runtime to make the ultimate twist almost insulting. It feels like a waste of time to play a game that sets up one world and the philosophical questions that accompany it only to not answer them and replace them with totally different ones at the end. The player doesn’t even get to suss out the truth about the world, some of the player’s buddies discover the truth on their own and kind of just tells Dan while they rest in a hallway at one point.

So Binary Domain fails to be an interesting whole because it shies away from the questions and implications it leads with. It’s a game that feels like it had its original ending removed and replaced with the ending of its sequel. The idea of hybrid humanbots feels like a step too far, too quick for a game that doesn’t really explore what it means for robots exist in our world in the first place. When playing Binary Domain I kept checking that it wasn’t a sequel to some game that never saw an english release, because the game actively comes across that way. None of the content in Binary Domain is “bad”, the direction the story goes in could be interesting in another work. But the game just doesn’t understand what it’s doing to the players who are along for the ride, and thus this misunderstanding leaves it totally unprepared to execute on its own goals.