Recompile

I loved Tron 2.0 when it first came out. The atmosphere, the environment, the general theme, all of it struck a chord with me. This looked incredibly similar and I pounced right on it. And in part, it is similar. I love the story. I love the aesthetics of the world, the menu screens and maps, the style of the log text, even the font. It all reminds me of delving too deeply into DOS and seeing pages of symbols and hexadecimal code. And I really do get a sense of "witness the birth of sapient AI" from seeing the transmissions from Hypervisor. I loved this game too when I started it. Exploring, reading logs, fighting off enemies... cheesing bosses by hiding behind the Stargate thingy so that they can't hit you any more. But then I reached the yellow level. I wanted to continue. I really did. I want to see how the game goes. I want to read all the logs. I want to watch the story play out to its conclusion. Another review says "The first comms level is a nightmare of jumping. You will get good at it or you will quit at this point". I quit. I tried and tried, but that particular platforming section is a perfect storm of annoyance. As already mentioned, there's no shadow and lining up the camera perfectly to match the platforms is beyond me. So I have no idea where I am, I miss the jump and I then have to spend several seconds falling down before the game graciously allows me to splatter against the ground. It then takes off a tenth of my healthbar and puts me right back at the start to do this whole platforming nightmare again. The weapon issues (can only fire when both feet are on the ground and while moving incredibly slowly) are a little annoying, but nothing I can't handle with a bit of thinking or panic usage of the timeslow function. But trying to jump onto a tiny little fragment of floating land with no idea as to exactly where you are? Sorry, Recompile. I tried to love you, but I just can't do it.

On the good side, the graphics are great and the in-computer universe should appeal to you if you liked Tron, FRACT OSC or Construct Escape The System. Exploring that world is pleasant in this game with mild Metroidvania mechanics. The story unveils progressively though you might not feel very involved. New powers are discovered at a good pace. Savepoints are placed often enough. In the harder platforming areas, plummeting to your death doesn't bring you too back behind, which doesn't make it too frustrating. My regrets are that hacking interactions are almost never used in the game. Given the abundance of "bits", it feels like there were former plans to make hacking have a more important place in the game. Also circuits puzzles can be solved without thinking by randomly activating switches. The game is mostly about platforming and shooting, there is much less puzzling than Supraland. The game is not very long. Unconfigurable keyboard controls are okayish except for the Ctrl key you will need near the end of the game, which may be a bit painful for your hand. Not necessarily a problem, but you might sometimes feel left on your own, as the oversimplified map doesn't tell what powerups you already collected. There are 2 endings, getting the good one is easier once you gain the final powerups. Hint: don't be afraid to increase the brightness in the settings or you might not see anything in darker areas!

1. You have basically no mobility while firing a weapon. You must have your feet firmly planted on the ground and can only move at a snail's pace around while shooting. You cannot shoot while jumping which makes bosses unreasonably difficult unless you find exploits. 2. The yellow area is just full of awful jumping puzzles. you have no shadow because everything is dark so you have to basically line up every jump horizontally then move your camera straight overhead to make sure you land on the next platform. The whole level is like this. It's terrible. When you inevitably do miss a jump you have to wait an eternity to watch your character fall before it respawns you with -10 HP (should be way less given how easy it is to miss jumps and how much you WILL do it). 3. Every time you respawn at a boss fight (you'll do this a lot too) you have to sit and wait for it to come out of letterbox and watch a little animation of your character equipping their weapon before you're given control to approach the boss again. That needs to be removed. 4. The game does not make it very clear that there is an intended order that the main areas must be approached. You can easily get yourself stuck in a puzzle that you absolutely don't have the abilities or resources to solve and will be forced to backtrack half of the world map to get back to where you should have gone in the first place. You need to go to the red area first, then green, then yellow then blue. You cannot complete them in any other order but the game lets you dig your own grave if you want. 5. The aiming feels terrible no matter if you're using a controller or a mouse. Be prepared to overshoot your targets and readjust constantly because the cursor never goes where you expect it to. The music in some places is nice enough but nothing really memorable and the story is interesting but not interesting enough for me to want to finish the game to find out how it ends given how bad the yellow area is designed.

As a fan of those TRON-like computer worlds, RECOMPILE immediately caught my attention. And after blazing through the entire game in just a few days (12h of playtime in total), I can say it was a very satisfying and absolutely beautiful experience. That isn't to say that the game is without flaws. The lines between genres blur a lot these days (a good thing), but I (personally) hesitate to call the game a Metroidvania. Yes, you do need certain abilities to make progress in specific areas, but the way the game was laid out, once you know in which order to tackle the specific areas, you can finish each of them 100% in one visit. And if you're not a fan of backtracking, that's a good thing. But I can't help that it gave the levels/areas and your abilities a more "scripted" feeling (if that makes any sense). Not linear, but not exactly organic, either. So I'd call it a Metroidvania-light (your mileage my vary). And this "light" continues throughout the rest of the game. The combat is a bit clunky (no firing while jumping), but once you get used to it, you want more. But apart from the security sector, enemy encounters are also very... "light". Same with the puzzles. Those logic puzzles are very interesting, but can often be solved with brute forcing or short-cut via your hacking ability. There's never a puzzle which really commits hard on one or the other. All that being said however, the world in which RECOMPILE takes place makes up for all of its shortcomings. The virtual world inside the mainframe is absolutely beautiful and as you discover logs which slowly reveal the story of the outside world, its characters and the AI which connects it all together. And just for that, RECOMPILE is absolutely worth it.