Released: March 2018
Formats: PS4 (tested), PC, Xbox One
Hardcore platformers. You will either love their challenge or rage quit out of them in five minutes flat. Occasionally though a few of them can give you enough of a carrot to keep you coming back for more and to some extent “Where Are My Friends” does this – but the game is going to make you mad. Very mad.
Where Is My Patience would be a great subtitle for this maddening platformerThe 2D platformer is split into two sections of the game. The first revolves around wheeling your one-eyed guy around his spaceship hub. Lonely, and in search of his friends you’ll have to solve some icon-based puzzles and fetch quests to open up the next bunch of hardcore platform levels in the game. The pace is slow, sedate and the artwork bold and colourful, but its a methodical and relatively simple connect the dots to do… and then the real game kicks in!
Zooming right out to simple platforms and a ton of colour matching portals, you’ll be jumping, rolling, dropping and missiling your way through portals across five worlds. At every turn or jump, there seem to be lasers ready to punish you and catch you out. When you first play a screen you’ll probably die a few times but learning through dying is the process which Where Are My Friends trades in. You might get a bit further, or simply not at all before trying to work out the pattern to the confusion and frustration around you.
Some of the puzzles are cleverly put together puzzles which you can learn to conquer by trial and errorThankfully, the game is generous with its respawns and usually doesn’t leave you with too much to do all over again which means sometimes you be rewarded for that one moment where things go half to plan. The controls are relatively tight which is a must for these types of games, although I found sometimes that the collision detection would sometimes preempt a death from a laser just before the laser turns on. Most of the time I’d have died anyway, but occasionally it felt unfair.
In some ways, I feel unfair for reviewing a game I haven’t completed but I feel like I will never get to the end in my lifetime and if I did, it would be through fudging it and not through skill. More importantly, I didn’t feel like I personally was going to enjoy the slog. This is a game that will appeal to its core audience, but others best go in eyes wide open – you will rage. My advice is to add one to the end score if you enjoy the challenge, subtract one if you don’t.
Your limit to progress in the game is purely down to a mix of dexterity and some luckYou can see a video review below:
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