Set in a sort of futuristic Vancouver, now a giant walled city in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Backbone provides some cool 2.5D cityscapes rendered in extremely lovely pixel art. The second reason that I will let Backbone get away with small irritations, is that it looks absolutely fantastic. Look at this stuff, how can you not love it? You can choose to ask fully engaged questions about his family, or just bluntly not care unless it's in relation to your own life. This is exemplified in the little talks you have with Anatoly, an old friend whose wife is expecting their second child. Howard as a character exists in flux, and it's your choices that can confirm him as empathetic, hopeful, or mired in self-pity and a vague existential guilt.
Your potential responses or questions will change depending on what you just asked or what the other character just said, and it all flows in a realistic way. The loops get a bit tangled a couple of times, but for the most part having a chat with someone in Backbone is one of the best, most natural conversations you'll see in a game.
The first is that the dialogue in Backbone is smashing, regardless of whether you agree with the ideas contained therein. Backbone also has that vague "animal species as allegory for racism" flavour - rodents are rarely allowed to be scientists, gorillas are in charge of everything, and most people dislike raccoons, for some reason - in a way that's ultimately so surface level that it may as well not exist to incur the slight eyebrow raise that it does.īut I'll largely forgive Backbone these missteps for two reasons.
It pulls off the noir tone throughout, but its central point does feel laboured after a while, and there are a couple of events in there that I couldn't quite understand, either on a metaphorical or literal level. What do you think the marquee reading CALL MOM represents? Once I shook off the surprise and got in the right headspace, though, I was still picking up what Backbone was putting down. There is a point in Backbone that I guarantee will make a lot of people mutter, "Wait, what?", which represents the final nail in the puzzle coffin. If EggNut wanted to make a full-blown puzzle game, they'd probably pull a blinder.īut these elements are gradually phased out as you carry on playing, until eventually you're fully in fever-dream-full-of-metaphors territory.
#Backbone game switch password#
Like figuring out password reset answers to brute-force access to a PC, or deciphering someone's clues for remembering a keypad code. The puzzles in these early sections are good, and while some don't really let you fail, a few of them are fabulous. You're initially digging into the suspect activities of a nightclub owner (who is also a bear), including blackmail, drugs, and good old fashioned organised murder. In the first part of the game, you're doing a bunch of skulking around as betrenchcoated raccoon Howard Lotor, following leads and collaborating with a cool investigative journalist (who is also a fox). Backbone is a good game, but if you were expecting something more like Monkey Island meets Zootopia then you might end up with some buyer's remorse.īackbone does want you to get into the mindset of a detective to start with, though. And I won't spoil the specifics of this transition (which are incredibly, incredibly weird) but I do think it's important you know that up front. About halfway through, for example, the detecting/solving a murder bit gets, for all intents and purposes, dropped entirely. Like The Good Place with more depression, or Disco Elysium with raccoons.īackbone isn't as unrelenting or dense as Disco Elysium, but it progresses in a similar vein. individualism, dressed up in the tropes of a detective puzzle game. It's more accurately described as a grim, philosophical, story-focused noir game about collectivism vs. So in that spirit, it seems important to tell you that Backbone is not the point and click detective adventure game with all puzzles you might have thought it was. Just ask the two old ladies who I once saw going into a screening of Zombieland and leaving after approximately seven minutes. From: Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic Games StoreĪn important part of having a lovely time with something is setting your expectations correctly.Backbone is less the detective noir you might expect, and more a story-driven philosophical exploration of empathy.
0 kommentar(er)
