Another good bundle, another chance that some of the games in it are complete unknowns to you, but seem to have good reviews. In this case, Subsurface Circular most certainly turned out to be a fantastic title and from a developer, previous projects of whom I loved. Weird how I’ve missed their newer projects. As for the Old Man’s Journey… Well, not every unknown is going to turn out a pleasant surprise.
It’s always a shame when a nice looking short game that was clearly not some throwaway idea, that had a lot of effort put into it just feels forgettable and boring. If it’s bad, or buggy or unfinished or anything like that, you can at least be angry or get some amusement and get some sort of understanding on why the game is like this. But when your last half hour of the hour and a half game is spent just wishing for the game to end already, when there’s zero emotional feedback despite the game clearly expecting it, and no engagement over the puzzles that probably were intended to be exciting, it’s just sad. Until you finish the game, forget it existed and move on.
Old Man’s Journey tries to be a nice looking simplistic adventure, clearly designed with touch screen in mind first, where your only meaningful interaction with the world is moving some scenery/landscape up or down to build a path for the character to move forward, with occasional scenes about the character past being there to drive the wordless story and get you interested. But it fails. Interaction is boring, finicky and never puzzling, rather then feeling like busywork before you are “awarded” with more story, with interaction itself being detached from the story. And the “story” is just pictures of someone’s life, of regrets, following the dreams and all the usual things. It could be presented in an great way that makes you care, despite seeing these types of stories countless times, but it’s just there, expecting you to simply care because it exists. Hell, there’s a wonderful example that makes you care about rather simple stories of geometric shapes, but this game makes no real attempt. And to make matters worse, by the end the game becomes overloaded with really terribly designed screens which are never “hard” puzzles, but rather even more frustrating to deal with than they were before because of bad camera angles and inconsistency of where the “goal” of the screen would even be. As such, despite the short length, the cute art style and potentially good puzzle mechanic, this game is tedious, forgettable and not worth the time.
Speaking of the well written games about geometric shapes, Subsurface Circular is very curious evolution of the text adventure from Mike Bithell and the team of Bithell Games, who are probably best known for the fantastic Thomas Was Alone from quite a few years back. And while it might look a bit unassuming or the whole “text adventure” angle might sound a bit imposing, if you’re familiar with old classics, it’s much simpler and more fun in reality and is far more similar to interesting branching dialogues you might have in great story-driven RPG games, something you might’ve seen in Visual Novels or even somewhat reminiscent of “dialogue battles” in the latest two Deus Ex games (far less silly though). As such, it’s a short interactive story about an investigation that takes place in the same commuter train car over the course of one long loop. Also, you are a robot and all the characters you talk to are robots.
And it’s shocking how effective the game is in using its limited resources. The sound and occasional music are spot on, creating the right mood. The writing is good, constantly keeping you intrigued, while letting you shape your talk in, perhaps, more limiting ways than some might want, but interesting ways nonetheless. It also borrows the ideas found in games like TES III: Morrowind for how you deal with keywords like you deal with inventory items in a “normal” adventure games to learn what you need. And the topics and themes of the game, while not particularly fresh, are presented in just the right way to make you pause before you make some of the choices. If you like story-driven reading-heavy games, you absolutely must check this game out.