Disoriented Reviews

TLDR; echochrome (2008) + Prey (2006) + Tetris (kinda) I bought this Unity engine based game on Christmas day of 2018. It was less than a buck, so money well worth it! What I didn't expect was it'd take me 7 years to finish it. Now just like tossing a lit match into a Gym building (the amount of flammable class 3 deodorant that whiffs out the front door from meters away is just astounding), I just so happened to start up a few more puzzle games that I've been unable to finish since then. *looks at The Swapper and shivers* Granted I left it alone for years. But the last game that similarly took me that long was The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on the original Game Boy. Disoriented has 30 levels. 3 of which I found quite difficult. So I used the same tactic, [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8h5Owjxomg]I took a break[/url]... I've said this many times before, but I highly encourage people not to look up a walkthrough, especially on YouTube nowadays. It's not really cheating but it'd defeat the point of playing imho. If you can't pass a game, then you just can't pass it. No different to a Rubik's Cube you can't solve. If you decide to look online to see if there's an easy algorithm to solve it, does that mean you solved the Rubik's Cube by yourself? The only exception is if there are obvious bugs. Some games do have level breaking bugs! But Disoriented is so minimalistic, you'll know if something is not quite right. Personally I didn't have any bugs. Most of the time you're walking from point A to B. Nothing fancy. In fact I can guarantee you, overthinking is what can land you in trouble. When Prey came out in 2006, it was like Vodou magic. People would walk through portals to different areas, up gravity ramps, see levels tile away and tile back in. Unfortunately it was a bit of a niche. Even today I'm still not entirely sure how they did the gravity ramp. If I had to take a guess, I'd say it's some kind of 3D volume created within the default map that purposely had different gravity applied to it. But even then the transitions were really smooth on each bend. You can refer to my [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49k-96WG2M0&t=110s]video here[/url] to see some of this mind-bending action! Now I'm only speculating here, but I don't think that's what Disoriented did. Would be nice if someone could confirm this. But I reckon when you move onto a ramp, what's actually happening is the entire map is rotating around the player position. Which gives the illusion of orientation-based gravity. Either that or the camera on the player object changes along with the direction of gravity, which I think would be harder to program. To back this up, I believe the echochrome (2008) level design (basically a white background) would make this harder to see, along with the fact there aren't any enemy entities or loose objects. Lastly, if you're falling through levels in any video game, it usually means your CPU decided to skip a beat when calculating collisions. Something that could get tricky with rotating (I assume) levels. Nevertheless, to reduce the risk of that you simply need to upgrade to a more powerful CPU. But of course as newer games become more complex, this will be an ongoing factor. Overall just a fair game, but severely underrated.

[h2]Disoriented[/h2] Has a total of [b]5[/b] trading cards.

2/10. This is a maze without walls, where you traverse floating walkways in the sky. The concept is good. Gravity is wherever your feet touch, with curved surfaces that allow you to change which way is up. Plus there are switches that rotate segments of the pathways and buttons that turn on and off segments. Unfortunately the levels are pretty disappointing. They went with extreme minimalism with their visual design, and while this can be done well, it isn’t here. It is often difficult to tell which way is up, and there are zero cues to tell you which walkways will be manipulated by the various switches and buttons. In the end the solution is almost always encountered by mistake and not by careful planning or by understanding the layout of the level. Also, too many levels are solved with the simple rule that if you see a thing, interact with it. Whether the levels are too easy, or too obtuse the end result is the same: solving them never makes you feel clever, just relieved to be done. At this point it’s already clearly a niche game, but it gets worse: the controls are not very good either. It’s way too easy to fall off of the platforms because movement is too twitchy, and there is no controller support; you must play with keyboard and mouse. If you’re still on the fence, let me suggest a different game: Attempt 42. While it is also filled with many questionable design choices and some definite flaws, it is actually an enjoyable implementation of the idea that you rotate gravity by walking on curved surfaces. And if you choose to think of its bugs as features that you can manipulate in order to make the levels easier to solve it’s actually a blast to play, in distinct contrast to this game.