FRAMED Collection Reviews

  • Titanium DragonTitanium Dragon154,829
    16 Sep 2021
    0 0 0
    Framed is a puzzle game that centers around rearranging animated comic book panels to get a character from the start of the page to the end without getting in trouble.

    This collection includes both the first Framed game as well as Framed 2, which is related to the first game and includes some of the same characters. In both games, the protagonists of the game are criminals, or perhaps spies, who are on the run from the police; their goal is to navigate their way through the world, often while carrying around a briefcase or envelope containing something important.

    Each of the two games forms a single continuous story. As you go through the game, a few new mechanics are introduced; while it starts out as simply rearranging the panels, some of the later levels include rotating panels (sometimes which are two panels long, resulting in a change to the comic book layout that also needs to be taken into account) and reusing the same panels multiple times after a delay (allowing you to change each scene multiple times – for instance, having someone go by, knock out a guard, and then come back from a different direction within the panel to go through the panel a way that previously would have gotten them arrested).

    Each page includes some “fixed” panels (typically the one at the start and the very end, though this varies by page) and some that you can move around. This forces you to set things up to suit particular needs.

    A key part of the game is that many of the panels can be entered from multiple directions or be recontextualized depending on what happened in previous panels; for instance, you might be able to don a disguise by going through the right panel, allowing you to bypass a guard, or you might be walking along the higher path rather than a lower one, allowing you to not have to go the way that the guard is looking.

    Playing around with the order of events is what makes this game work, and while the mechanics are simple, the game manages to do a number of clever things in order to mix things up. Things from disguises to activating power switches to running along conveyor belts, even fight scenes, can all be rendered in this way, and there twists on even higher levels of rearrangement that can recontextualize what has been going on.

    These games are simple, but clever, which extends to the art style, which is simplistic but still looks really great. The whole thing flows really well, and presents a number of interesting challenges.

    There are only two real caveats. The first is that the game is very short; both games, combined, take maybe three or four hours to beat. While getting some achievements might extend this, you’re not likely to see it take more than five hours all told. Secondly, even at the very short length of these games, they do end up getting a little bit repetitive at times; there are only a very small number of mechanics, and while they do remix them in interesting ways, they still do feel like they kind of end up repeating some puzzles in some ways.

    All in all, though, this is a pretty cool game, and if you are interested in puzzle games and it sounds cool to you, you’ll probably like it.
    3.0
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