Gerald James reviews Macrotis: A Mother’s Journey…
In a market over-saturated with large budget AAA titles that are driven by the bottom line and little else I often find myself more drawn to indie games as there seems to still be a sense of artists wishing to just make the best game they can. When a new developer hits the scene, you always wish the best for them and tend to look at their initial outing as more a message of intent then as a game unto itself. Unfortunately this leads to what is essentially viewing a first outing through rose-colored glasses and makes it hard to be overly critical. That said, today I’ll be looking at Macrotis: A Mother’s Journey. As a debut, it serves as a framework for what Proud Dinosaurs may be able to accomplish in the future, but not much else.
Macrotis put’s you in the role of a mother Bilby (read: weird anthropomorphic rat thing) who is trying to get back to her children after a tragic flood washes her away from them amidst a never-ceasing hurricane. You’re constant goal is just getting back to your babies and ending the hurricane through magic. This wouldn’t be a bad plot for a platformer were it not for the fact that the game wears this not as a background motivation but in a way where it wants you to believe that this is a grand and intricate plot. The exposition is heavily doled out at you to the point of every thirty seconds being littered with dialogue about the character’s babies or needing to go up when the level is leading you further down.
A poor story can be told in a captivating way as long as it’s told interestingly, but that isn’t the case here. The game seems so self-absorbed in a plot they surely thought would grab the player that they seemed to ignore writing it in a way that would make anyone care and I certainly couldn’t find any compassion for this character, especially given how horribly the stilted dialogue was delivered. Yet again, I feel I should be a little more considerate given the prototypical nature of the game’s development but I refuse to believe that they didn’t get any feedback on the voice acting before finalizing everything.
This could all be forgivable if the gameplay were solid. After all, it’s a puzzling platformer. It’s not like anyone showed up for the plot anyway. Sadly, the game makes a chore of it’s mechanics for the sake of difficulty instead of focusing on fun or discovery. There’s a lot of trial and error where the gameplay loop lies in you trying different solutions to puzzle rooms or working through platforming areas where you will likely die many times before moving on to the next area. If you don’t die you can always reset the current area if you block yourself in. Not so bad, I assumed, as I was familiar with games that were based on this trial and error playstyle but when you compound this load-try-load again loop with a terrible line of dialogue being read poorly each reset the result becomes tedium. While pounding my head against a wall over and over on the same time sensitive puzzle the last thing I want is to hear the same line of bad student film dialogue being delivered from someone who has never bothered with a second take.
The art style was it’s saving grace for a good while in the beginning of the game. The detailed 2.5d backgrounds and the charming character model were pleasing enough until you dive deeper and find that those quirky art additions just continue to compile on themselves to create a scene in which it’s too busy to focus on the puzzles or precise platforming required. The music and sound design were competently done and at times felt as if it was from a studio who had been around the block a few times even if the score itself is basic fantasy fare.
The end result is a game that wants to feel like a heavy narrative fueled puzzle-platformer that challenges and inspires but ultimately fails on all fronts. I did find myself enjoying some of the puzzle mechanics in areas where I wasn’t being forced to try to figure out the solution in an arbitrarily short amount of time but as soon as fun started to creep in some poor control decision or absurd repeated dialogue line would snap me back to reality and remind me that I was playing someone’s half-baked first attempt at game design. I do hope that Proud Dinosaurs finds this game to be a learning experience and can knock it out of the park next time but as for now I would be hard pressed to recommend this game to anyone, even at it’s $10 price point.
Pros:
+Interesting art style
+Decent score, if not a little generic
+Solid puzzle ideas
Cons:
-Frustrating controls
-Abysmal dialogue and delivery
-Grating repetition
-Generic feeling throughout
Rating: 4/10
Reviewed on Steam
Gerald James – One half of Mushbrains Media and Mushbrains: The Podcast, Flickering Myth’s gaming podcast
