#recompile

Chat gpt, anyone?

Photo Credit: Me

Recently Completed: Recompile (Xbox Series X)

This is a 3rd-person Metroidvania set inside a badly damaged computer system. Think Hollow Knight meets Tron, and you're in the neighbourhood. You play as a piece of injected code on a mission to repair the various areas of the computer, while finding upgrades, and recovering text-based logfiles that explain what happened to the original system owners.

For my thoughts this time I want to try something I learned a long time ago: assigning Stars for the things you like, and Wishes for things you wish were different.

Stars:

Lovely aesthetic, sounds, and soundtrack.

The ASCII menus and animations are awesome, and completely sell the "hackery" vibe.

The story logfiles are well-written and it's genuinely interesting to discover the fate of the system administrators.

Wishes:

From the first area onward, platforming is fiddly and I missed many, many jumps, or just slid off the side of something. The game doesn't help by being quite hazy and/or dark in places.

You're often forced to fight on extremely small ledges as well, and will probably just slip off before the enemies get you.

I felt pretty bad at combat so the optional "slow-mo" upgrade, that slows the game world to a crawl, was a godsend. I used it everywhere.

The map looks cool but isn't terribly helpful; at least it could remove icons for upgrades you've already found, which it does not do.

This is sort of a big one, but the game is widely noted for giving very little overt instruction to the player. That doesn't have to be a bad thing! Unfortunately, I made it to the end of the game with various sections of the computer in different states of "repair" (there are meters that show progress) but I actually have no idea what I did other than explore them.

There are even different endings based on your repair levels! But what do you even do to change that? I don't know!!

Review: Recompile

On the surface, Recompile might look and sound like an interesting, potentially unique, proposal. A game that aims to fuse Metroidvania-like exploration, logic-based puzzle-solving and combat in a way that is both mechanically as much artistically intriguing to engage with. Phigames’ delivery, however, misses the mark spectacularly in just how poorly-crafted and at times, off-putting both its level design and means of communication is in instructing the player on where specifically their next destination should ideally be.

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Recompile Review (PS5) | Push Square

Recompile is one of those games that shows extremely well, but the reality is an experience that doesn’t quite stick the landing. Playing as a virus with the intent of infiltrating and fixing The Mainframe, a computer system that’s gone awry, this is a 3D action game that looks great, but doesn’t quite have enough to back it up. The presentation is very slick indeed, with the UI and environments…