A beautiful-looking game in a world without humans that has an expensive price despite its short playtime.
Type: Single-player
Genre: Point n Click
Developer: New Game Order
Publisher: New Game Order
Release date: 22 Sep, 2016
Intro
Humans have gone extinct. Robots are taking over the planet. Provided with the abundance of leftovers from human civilizations, robots are rebuilding a new civilization for their kind. Join the adventure of RT-217NP, a robot that is capable of various human tasks with no particular mission or purpose in this atmospheric 3D point-and-click game.
Graphics
The game puts its camera and background effects to good use. Have you seen some photos that are blurred to make a certain object stand out? Most cutscenes are taken with these kinds of designs in mind. The beautiful-looking backgrounds with some effects also do a good job in setting up the atmosphere. You can see the empty, barren world with some smoke effect outside, the subtle sunlight that reaches the house, or the darkness that surrounds the building. I couldn’t stop admiring the scenery throughout my playthrough due to its quality.
Story
The game is told from a robot’s perspective which never interacts with a human being. You can see how little the robot understands about humans through its series of questions that is logical, yet make sense. Why do humans need bottled waters when there is water in the sink? Why people develop genetically modified crops although they consider them dangerous? All of these interesting questions give a new perspective to our world and our “weird” behavior, although most of them are just pure curiosity on the robot’s side which is interesting to see.
The main story focuses on a different topic that is related to the world. The game allows you to answer some dialogues with different options, sometimes resulting in a game over screen. However, choosing one option means that you can’t choose the others even though they refer to different things. I was curious about what the other response will be if I chose differently, although judging from the linear storyline, there shouldn’t be much that I missed. Moreover, since it’s only the first chapter of the story, it’s not surprising that the story will end in a cliffhanger. Luckily, the second chapter is already out (our review), although the story doesn’t end there either.
The Game
Gameplay
Collecting items and interacting with objects is the core of this game. Walking around the area might be necessary to find some items although the camera might hinder you from collecting some due to how it works – it won’t show the whole screen unless if you walk to the very corner of the area. Some items might be hidden this way, making it hard to find. Moreover, some items can only be interacted with after you progress the game, forcing you to double or triple checking the area in case you’re missing something.
Minigames
The game offers other activities in the form of puzzles, minigames, and QTEs to avoid repetitiveness. They are easy to understand and finish except for one where you have to differentiate between different tones. Tone-deaf players like me will have a problem in solving this puzzle since the game doesn’t offer an alternative. I ended up giving up and checking the solution for this since I only have brute-forcing 4 combinations as the other option.
Length and Replayability
I finished the game in 3h. Some of my playtimes were spent reloading my save to get an achievement. The game doesn’t allow manual saving, so you have to reload your save from the latest checkpoint if you somehow screw up. There is no replayability value unless if you want to read all dialogue options, which doesn’t mean much in the first place.
Problems
Your character is walking too slow. You can order the robot to run, but you still need to wait a bit before it gains some speed. Moreover, the running speed isn’t that different from walking speed either. The robot will also be stuck if you are interacting with an object from the wrong position. Luckily, you just need to readjust its position to fix it.
Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Verdict
A lot of effort was put into the game. I felt like I was inside the game the whole time and the voice dub conveys the robot-filled world perfectly with its robot voice and emptiness. The slow pacing and walking speed also make me feel that the game lasts for more than three hours, and although some people might get turned off with its expensive price, the game has better quality than most games that require similar spec.
