Game Reviews

RETSNOM review - the next Braid?

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RETSNOM review - the next Braid?
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| RETSNOM

It's clear that SOMI, the one-man developer behind RETSNOM, is a student of modern indie classics.

The game has the gloomy feel and pixelated zombie monstrosities of Lone Survivor, a whiff of The Swapper and VVVVVV in its puzzling, and a dash of Braid mixed in for good measure.

These all being good games, this should be something to recommend it.

However, the inevitable comparisons serve only to highlight that it's far from the first game to play the pixel art puzzle platformer with a dark edge card and that, fairly or not, it will have to work harder to stand out.

Man in the mirror

RETSNOM, as the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed, is MONSTER spelled backwards.

This is a stylised nod to the game's central mechanic, which has you flipping the layout of environments to mirrored, alternate realities so that our protagonist can scurry and leap his way through them.

His motivation for doing so is to travel into the future and find a cure for the rampant zombie virus that is ravaging his daughter.

However, there's a central conflict in that, along the way, he faces many individuals in whom the same virus is more advanced - making them appear like monsters, but in fact just as human as the daughter he's at such pains to rescue.

And while it's to some extent at the player's discretion how Rambo-esque they go with the supplied machine gun, mowing the wretched souls down often feels unavoidable.

A poor reflection

RETSNOM is a PC port, and so comes to mobile with a virtual d-pad and buttons. It does the job but, as always, suffers in some of the more precise platforming moments.

But mercifully, there aren't many. All solutions ultimately lie in the game's mirroring mechanic, which involves rebuilding the world through reflections at the touch of a button.

Occasionally, there are glimpses of how this could have been a satisfying mechanic.

However, it's inadequately explained and relies on way too much trial and error, meaning that the satisfaction of having solved a puzzle through ingenuity simply isn't there.

The game insists on further complicating things, eventually allowing you not just to switch from left to right, but also vertically to make the world upside down.

The unfortunate truth is that as a puzzler, it's more frustrating than anything.

Off the mark

Perhaps this could be overlooked if the game lived up to its promise on the atmospheric narrative front - an area in which is promises so much with its premise and stiflingly depressive soundtrack.

But the story RETSNOM tells (threaded throughout in snippets of text, natch) lacks the smartness and subtlety of the indie peers in whose image it was so clearly made.

It swings for profundity inelegantly, winding up feeling like a tribute act's compilation of indie game greatest hits - the ingredients all there, just lacking a spark.

RETSNOM review - the next Braid?

RETSNOM promises great things, and has good moments, but is ultimately trite and not all that interesting
Score
Matt Suckley
Matt Suckley
Achingly contrarian. Proud owner of an N-Gage and a PSP Go. Matt spends most of his time writing about indie games of which you've never heard. Like that one, yes. Matt is an English student, and largely terrible at games. Go figure.