Red Stewart reviews Macrotis: A Mother’s Journey…
“Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it. For them there is no winter food problem. They have fires and warm clothes. The winter cannot hurt them and therefore increases their sense of cleverness and security. For birds and animals, as for poor men, winter is another matter. Rabbits, like most wild animals, suffer hardship.”
So goes one of my favorite quotes from Richard Adams’s Watership Down, not only because of how richly written it is, but because it contains an eternal truth: when it comes to the natural world, humans are pampered. Something as simple as rain and snowfall may seem trivial to us. However, for the creatures that thrive in the woodlands, these climate patterns become harrowing nightmares that literally dictate life and death.
One such weather condition is the basis for Macrotis: A Mother’s Journey’s plot, wherein an anthropomorphic bilby is separated from her joeys during an unnatural torrent, forcing her to go on a long adventure to reunite with them. Developed by Proud Dinosaur and published by Orsam Information Technologies, Macrotis is another stab at the platforming genre, a subset of video games that have been making a comeback this past decade thanks to the prominence of digital distribution mediums across consoles and PCs alike.
The question is does Proud Dinosaur’s debut hit a home-run in this burdened genre, or is it a case of trying and failing? The short answer is it works in spite of some sensorial problems. For the long answer, read on!
Continuing from above, Macrotis follows a mother marsupial’s “journey” after she is washed away from her children as a result of a hurricane. I bring this up again because this isn’t just one of those simple Super Mario Bros. “save the princess” plots which are, more or less, basins meant to provide a basic-level of storytelling to service the gameplay. The narrative here goes beyond just getting back to the surface: Mother Bilby’s odyssey through the subterranean taverns of her world brings her in contact with a wizard, magical items, and an entire mythos that I’m confident the team at Proud Dinosaur wants to expand upon should this game prove a success.
What I can say, without spoiling too much, is that this surface look at the lore is sufficient. The writers don’t try and bite off more than they can chew, and the story is the better for it since it isn’t overstuffed. I feel like too often new IPs are so desperate to stand-out from their contemporaries that they throw a bunch of raw information and mythology at players without taking the time to flesh out a coherent tale. This has the effect of making gamers ultimately not care about what they’re experiencing since they can’t get invested in the characters or drama on their own merits.
That being said, what is shown is your standard fantasy trope of a great forgotten race: in the Elder Scrolls, this was the Dwemer; in The Witcher, these were the Aen Seidhe, and in Macrotis they are simply referred to as the “Little People.” Could more have been done on this front, sure, but at the end of the day this is a platformer, not an action-adventure title, and it therefore didn’t need an extravagant backstory.
The way the story is depicted is important, and so we move onto graphics. Honestly, I’m going to be purely subjective here as I personally was not a fan of Proud Dinosaur’s artistic decision in rendering the game. On the outset, Macrotis follows the example set forth by the Donkey Kong Country series (side note- my personal favorite video game franchise) by having a 3D-character operate in 2D (or in this case 2.5D) environments. The thing is, when Rare was creating Donkey Kong Country, they made the smart decision to have the background match the character model’s style so that the two blended well in spite of their differing geometry.
Proud Dinosaur unfortunately didn’t do the same. Mother Bilby looks like a CG-figure out of the mid-2000s, which wouldn’t be a bad thing were it not for the fact that the aforestated backdrops are of a different aesthetic. They’re gorgeous, aiming for something in-between naturalism and romanticism; you venture through various scenery, from rocks to bricks to crystals to metalworks, that all have the grit of real-life foundations, yet are imbued with a bright hue that always reminds you that you’re in a fantastical place.
It’s a contrast that unfortunately didn’t work for me because of how out-of-place Mother Bilby appeared. I mean yes, she is technically not in her element, but the rabbit hole she falls through lands her in a place that seems like a completely different video game generation. The idea of putting divergent artstyles together is something that only works if employed for comedic, horror, or surreal purposes (see The Amazing World of Gumball, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Duck Amuck for direct references) due to the bizarre complexion, none of which applies to the serious drama that Macrotis inhabits.
It’s not completely distracting, and you definitely will get over it after the first 20 or so minutes, but I genuinely would like to have known the decorative reasoning behind this decision.
Alongside this, that earlier observation about the colors of the scenery having a luminosity to them is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes for some truly beautiful surroundings, but on the other it exposes the game’s use of static lighting. No matter where you go, the lighting is always at the same level of glow, which is fine, however I do believe it took away from some of the atmospheric power that the game could have had by showing dynamic fluorescent changes as the player moves from Terra-settings to a more-industrialized landscape. On top of that, the shadow effect for Mother Bilby is half-baked; you have something there, but the silhouette is so congested that you have to actively concentrate to see the tail swinging animation.
Graphics aside, audio is next, and here we have very good news and very bad news. Let’s get the bad out of the way: sound effects are minimal and the voice acting is terrible. There is programmed SFX in the game, but even with its settings turned all the way up I could barely make it out in my playthrough. Perhaps this was a field that the designers decided to skimp on, and it hurts the game overall because of how integral sound is to platforming: everyone remembers the warbly noise of getting a growth mushroom or the blast of Mega Man’s gun or the spin of Sonic’s spikes or the masterful symphony of sonance that was Limbo. Sound is very important for platformers, and I hope Proud Dinosaur makes note of that next time.
I also hope that they learn to hire better VAs as it has been a while since I’ve heard a performance this bad. Mother Bilby is played by an actress named Mallory Echelmeyer, who seems to be using Stephanie Sheh as the basis for her delivery. It’s high-pitched, which makes it both tonally hard to bear and out-of-touch for a maternal character with three kids. I’m under the impression that the dialogue team figured that, because she was playing a small animal, this was the right take, but in actuality it doesn’t work because of Mother Bilby’s biological age- this is a parental figure who needed to sound mature, not like a stereotypical Japanese schoolgirl. It’s not just that her voice is off, but her inflections rarely live up to the thespian quality Mother Bilby’s lines needed to be delivered at, especially when they veer into emotional territory, though I’m willing to chart this up to mediocre voice direction.
Andy Mack, who portrays the Wizard, is a little better, but it sounded like he was more interested in doing a Gandalf-impression than his own thing. As such, his character, more often than not, comes off as a hackneyed archetype that you could have plucked from any fantasy setting.
The saving grace to all of this is the score. This is one of the few games I’ve played where I have refused to click “start” on the loading screen solely because I wanted to hear the rest of the melodious main theme, and the music continued to maintain that sweeping harmony as I spent hour after hour in this world. It’s therefore bitterly ironic that I could not find the name of the composer anywhere, neither in the game’s credits nor Proud Dinosaur’s press kit. Emin Can Kargi is credited as the audio director, but I can’t say for certain whether they were also responsible for the score. Whoever it was though, I have nothing but praise for you. Listening to Macrotis’s music brought me back to the aural domains created by such maestros as Jeremy Soule, Yasunori Mitsuda, David Wise, and Hiroki Kikuta.
In the end, however, it is the gameplay that will keep players in touch, and with I will say that Macrotis is a damn good platformer. It relies more-so on solving puzzles than conventional platforming, which is made all the more interesting by its use of a spirit mechanic. Basically, your character gains the ability to astral project, creating a weightless avatar that can phase through objects and move obstacles. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of the recorder from The Talos Principle, but much easier to use.
The puzzles are all solid, even though there were times where I felt the programmers indulged in a “Wolf, Goat, Cabbage” style of design of having you do repetitive tasks for the sake of elongating a challenge. But that was luckily kept to minimum. That being said, it would have been nice to have seen more abilities/powers unlocked for the ghostly apparition; however, I understand that budgetary constraints more than likely limited things over a lack of imagination from the development team.
In the end, it took me about 5-6 hours to beat Macrotis: A Mother’s Journey, and that number included gathering the game’s sole collectible of tome pages, which you never have to go out of your way to find. Because of this, I can safely say that the game is rightfully-priced at $10.00 and therefore worth recommending both on its own merits as well as a monetary:playtime ratio. Consider checking it out if you love platformers.
Pros:
+Great puzzles
+Amazing score
+Magnificent backgrounds
+Elegant hand-drawn artwork for the game’s cutscenes
Cons:
-Bad voice acting, particularly from main character
-Minimal SFX
-Lighting could have been better
Rating – 7/10
Reviewed on PC
Red Stewart
