Remedy Review — Russell Troxel

Jul 11

Jul 11 Remedy Review

I wish that, after six weeks of sustained protesting against authoritarian violence and racial injustice, America would be in better shape but unfortunately truly awful and monstrous things are still happening on a daily basis here. I’m trying to be yet another voice helping keep these tragedies front of mind because I’m so frustrated that evil like this continues to exist. I hope everyone is doing what they can, whether it be donating, signing and circulating petitions, protesting, or even just sharing news articles to make sure no one forgets what’s happening. Of course, after that, you’ve got to give your mind and soul a break, and, as you know, my breaks are spent reviewing and playing video games to help the rest of you know where best to spend your precious time and money. This week, I looked at a game about restoring a broken, dead world.

Remedy is a first-person puzzle platformer that starts off with a bang. Before the player is given control, the world is destroyed by an enormous geometric shape because, as anyone who had a math class in high school knows, geometry is evil. After everything has been dead for a while, a small orb awakens. The orb confronts the evil geometry but is unable to convince it to restore the world, so the orb creates the player to heal the damage done. The player, devoid of any actual identity, is told by the orb that they must retrieve the three Crystals of Ruin in order to bring back the life the geometric shape annihilated. To retrieve the Crystals, the player must navigate a gulch filled with strange machines and puzzles, shutting down the impenetrable barriers protecting the Crystals. And, for each Crystal retrieved, the player gains new powers to access new parts of the gulch, enabling them to go further in their quest.

Last week I said that I’m usually not that big of a fan of puzzle games, but now that I’ve played through both Keen: One Girl Army as well as Remedy I’m beginning to think that’s not true. One major reason that changed over the past week is how much fun I had figuring out the genuinely cool puzzles in Remedy. Being a puzzle platformer, a big part of figuring out the puzzles in Remedy is navigating the levels to find new aspects and angles of the puzzle, including new portions to be solved or new tools to solve existing puzzles with, and Remedy handles this well. My favorite method in particular is how the game will occasionally shift gravity, sending the player “falling” sideways against a wall to walk paths that are only accessible thanks to the new orientation. A close second to the gravity alteration is the game’s use of portals. Some puzzles feature portals that will transport the player to a new area, but that hasn’t been special since at least 2006. Where Remedy’s portals really shine is that looking through them can reveal hidden information when viewed from specific angles. The last in the trifecta of good puzzle mechanics is the game’s use of a power it calls X-Ray Vision but it’s more like the ability to see invisible objects. Scattered around the back half of the game’s levels are invisible platforms that are revealed when the player activates their x-ray vision, but only in a narrow area in front of the player. Better still, when the player deactivates their x-ray vision, any platforms that were revealed at that time remain visible until the player activates the power again. I really liked this because it allowed me to reveal things at clever angles for extra advantages and let me decide how much of any level I needed to see to properly navigate. These three features, combined with some puzzle standards like placing blocks on switches, make for puzzles that are good brain-ticklers that are still approachable to those without the best platforming reflexes.

Getting in the way of Remedy’s great puzzles are a plethora of technical problems. I know that making video games is an arduous process and trying to find every bug can be a difficult task for even large teams, so I’m not surprised that the one-man developer Starside Studios couldn’t catch them all, but that doesn’t change the fact that this game is stuffed with them. The first time I beat each of the three main puzzles to obtain a Crystal, my game crashed to desktop and, worse still, did not save that I had beaten that puzzle so then I had to do it all over again. All of the fun in a puzzle is figuring it out, not the implementation of that solution, so doing these puzzles a second time was extremely grating, and they aren’t short puzzles either, so each time I reached a major milestone in this game I had to spend five to ten minutes repeating the solution like I was in Groundhog Day. Beyond that, there are quite a few places, usually tucked in between the rocks players can scale to proceed with puzzles, where players can wedge themselves with no way out other than exiting back to the main menu to reload the previous checkpoint, which also erases any progress they made since then. There are also bugs in at least one level composition, where a bizarre double-bug first prevented me from completing a puzzle by not giving me a weighted cube I needed to solve it but then allowing me to bypass a huge portion of that puzzle by letting me use the double-jump ability to simply leap to the goal area. Finally, I know game length isn’t a bug, but I beat Remedy in about 4 hours and that speaks to the technical limitations of the minuscule development team.

Honestly, I feel bad for penalizing Remedy for issues inherent to small development teams, but at the same time those problems severely disrupted the good time I was having with the game’s puzzles. On the bright side, bugs and glitches can be patched out, but I’m pretty sure you can’t patch a game into a better idea, so once Remedy gets cleaned up, I think it’ll be a solid recommendation. Until then, I’d say look for it for less than $10.