If style triumphed over substance here, Roll Back Home would be rolling back home with a much better review score.
The game is presented as a flip book, hastily doodled on a chunky pad of graph paper. It's skittish and messy - each frame is not a perfect recreation of the one before it, and your time is a scribbled page number in the top corner.
But if it really were a flip book, it would be the world's most boring animation. It would be a flip book about a sentient yoga ball, rolling through some sewers and repeatedly failing to bounce over a small pit of spikes.
It's hardly a stickman getting decapitated by a laser beam, is it?
At 3,900 pages long, this pad of paper is HOW thick??
Because for all its style - including an insanely good mix tape of weird electronica as its background music - Roll Back Home just isn't much fun.
In each level, you have to tilt your phone to make a heavy ball trundle through a maze of corridors until you find a sign marked 'Home'. The ball is cumbersome to control and moves at a lumbering pace, with an acceleration of about 0 to 60 in eight years.
Whenever you have to carefully balance on a narrow elevator or hop through a tight space, the lurching momentum and too-real physics turn the game into an exercise in frustration.
And by putting a wall of spikes at the end of a big downhill ramp, Roll Back Home just reminds you that this game doesn't want you to have fun and that fun is for losers.
The levels are linear, but they often loop back on themselves
Along the way, you'll need to jump over a few spikes, squeeze through some gaps, and maybe explore a pair of avenues to find the right one. Otherwise, though, it's a remarkably straightforward game.
Roll Back Home does eventually introduce some more exciting ideas - like a big battering ram that can knock down a fragile wall - but they come too late and are spread too thinly.
Ultimately, Roll Back Home is a dull and frustrating game, masquerading as something fresh and inventive. Behind the bold visual design and catchy soundtrack, this is just a frumpy physics-puzzler that you'd do well to avoid.
Roll Back Home
Roll Back Home has a daring and arresting visual style. Boring and irritating gameplay, however, means this is the worst waste of paper since the Daily Mail
Mark Brown
Mark Brown spent several years slaving away at the Steel Media furnace, finally serving as editor at large of Pocket Gamer before moving on to doing some sort of youtube thing.