Relicta is a first person puzzle game that really wants to be Portal.
Like all such games, it falls well short.
But unfortunately, it doesn’t even manage to stand out particularly as its own thing. Despite its high graphical fidelity and production quality, it starts out promising but ends up falling apart about halfway through, both in terms of gameplay and story.
Like all such games, it has a “core mechanic”. The core mechanic here is the ability to give blocks (and some pads that can hold charges) either a red charge or a blue charge. Opposite colored charges attract, same-colored charges repel.
In addition, you can make blocks weightless, allowing them to fly through the air after having been given a push from a charge, or continuing on their momentum from a moving platform.
That’s it. That’s all there is.
The game is entirely centered around grabbing blocks and putting them on buttons to get rid of various force fields blocking your way, and sometimes toggling the odd switch. The force fields can either block everything, or only one thing – you, blocks, or drones.
There are some platforms that you can move, along with some drones that remove all special effects on all nearby blocks and charge pads, and which can carry blocks.
And… that’s all the mechanics there is.
The problem is, this is a 15 hour long game, but it has fewer, and less interesting, mechanics than something like Portal 2.
So how does it make the game last 15 hours?
Unfortunately, the answer to that is by just making increasingly long puzzles in the back half of the game. Frequently, puzzles would either be multi-stage things, where you go through a series of mini-puzzles, or a puzzle where there was some sort of “hub” that you kept on having to solve mini-puzzles to unlock a central door. Only rarely were there big puzzles that actually felt like they integrated all the pieces.
As a result, the entire second half of the game starts to end up feeling tedious rather than interesting. Some of the later game puzzles were okay, but never was there a puzzle in the game where I felt like it was particularly amazing to solve. A lot of the “harder” puzzles were harder because you couldn’t find a particular “puzzle piece”, so to speak; once you actually had the pieces in hand, what you were actually supposed to do was often fairly straightforward, if sometimes fiddly later in the game, as you had to line things up rather awkwardly to make some puzzles work, as the “snap-to” portions didn’t work in some areas due to them not sending you in quite the right direction or being aligned in the right way.
The game ends up just kind of dragging on by the end, and I just wanted it to be over.
Which brings up the other problem – the story.
It starts out promisingly enough – there’s some sort of inciting incident with a weird purple crystal, you have a set of coworkers around and a daughter who is coming to the space station, ect.
The problem is, this all ends up falling apart about halfway through the game. The central plot twist of the game isn’t very good and results in almost all of the characters you spent the first half of the game talking with never talking to you again throughout the rest of the game. As a result, the game's supporting cast dynamics end up being totally tossed out the window and not mattering at all for the rest of the game, as you end up interacting with a second, and less interesting, set of characters for the second half of the game.
Indeed, if you spend any time thinking about the plot twist, it both feels unnecessarily convoluted and makes no physical sense, nor sense with the other characters in the story, who act like no time has passed at all. The loss of contact with their former colleagues gets short shrift and the story itself seems to forget about what happened to them, as the characters don’t seem to care despite supposedly being emotionally invested. Only at the very end of one of the game’s two multiple endings (which are chosen at the last minute for… some reason? I don’t even know why it has multiple endings…) does the game remember “Oh, these people existed” and actually follow up on it at all, and then only in a stinger thing that is not very satisfying (though there’s more from a title update I have yet to play).
Overall, then, the game fails to deliver in terms of story, character, or gameplay. The story doesn’t even make a ton of sense in terms of characterization, and the gameplay is too simple for a game as long as Relicta is. Despite a potentially promising start, it just doesn’t hold up, and it never really does anything particularly good, let alone great.
2.0