so i thought i’d experiment on cross-posting an edited comment for festival judging i left on this game - because i spent long enough playing and it’s worth at least saying something about a game like this here. because it’s also already out… and i’m not saying anything confidential or i wouldn’t say in a review etc. i also wouldn’t give a game like this my time otherwise probably, so it’s worth saying something about.
my friend’s first comment upon seeing the Steam page was “this looks like NFT art” and boy, it does
but anyway, this game Recursive Ruin is a puzzle/narrative game with a visual style and puzzle design that recalls Manifold Garden, among other things. enough to probably be fairly deemed a “Manifold Garden” clone i’d say. but it is also definitely its own kind of experience…
the narrative is like a mix of the sort of depressive navel-gazey thing about a floundering depressed artist in his 20’s with an abusive father that a lot of indie walking sims mine as subject material with some kind of highly bizarre sci-fi plot. the tone is i think trying for something darkly comedic, but it’s hard to tell at times… giving it kind of an unintentionally amusing quality to it. then, in the video game world you have these bizarre syfy channel B-movie characters with ridiculous names that are all like robed shadows or sentient floating orbs or whatever that prattle on in this kind of indulgent grandiose abstract sci-fi prose. it kind of went beyond the point of being merely bad and self-serious to being kind of amusing to me, but it’s not exactly what you’d hope for in a game. it actually reminded me of another weird indie vanity project i think about a lot that has some interesting/weird ideas in it along with incredibly overwrought and overly long character dialogue called This Strange Realm of Mine
i actually enjoyed the puzzles to Recursive Ruin a good amount of what i played. they made me think a little bit of Mirror Drop, as well as a lot of a lot of games in the Portal/QUBE/etc mold. i guess i like those kinds of puzzlers. do i think the mechanics are maybe pushing that genre forward? maybe not. but it’s a lot better than i expected, and was enough to keep me going for longer than i expected. especially but for something with a narrative so silly and overwrought i kind of expected puzzles that weren’t as well developed as they were. the last section i played before stopping was heavily plot and just seemed very spooky repeat PT-hallway wandering thing wasn’t altogether very interesting at all though. i really don’t know what they were thinking with that section - i’ve seen total bottom of the barrel indie horror games do a better job of cribbing off of PT.
the visual style is truly beautiful though, at least in the puzzle worlds. even though it’s heavily borrowing the recursive world concept from Manifold Garden it feels like it has its own visual identity. that alone made a lot of stuff worth playing. it’s cool that people can make videogames that look like this now.
it is hard to summarize exactly what the appeal of these kinds of games are to people expecting things to be, uh, like 100% good and worth endorsing. because that’s not what is interesting about these kinds of games. it is kind of what i’d think of a “B-movie”/exploitation version of a game like Superliminal that nonetheless overachieves and feels kind of unique to itself. there are moments in this that were really great. especially in the puzzle worlds, when the music hits a kind of wistfully abstract early 0pn style (as much as 0pn is my personal nemesis) and you’re trying to suss out the environments in these giant abstract shifting sci-fi worlds it felt really great.
but the voice acting is too cheesy to not be off-putting. the design is pretty good in the puzzle parts, but i’m not sure if it’s anything anyone who hasn’t played Manifold Garden or Superliminal or whatever hasn’t seen before. the story is pretty bad and overwrought but in kind of a (perhaps unintentionally) campy amusing way.
anyway this is probably another one for my personal canon of my “overachieving B-game/vanity project that are kind of bad but also kind of great” that Soul Axiom (the greatest of all of these kinds of games), Where The Bees Make Honey, and also This Strange Realm of Mine belong in