![]() It’s like fusing Portal and Metal Gear Solid’s VR missions, but losing the delightful empowerment of the former, the precision and agency of the latter. That can be a bit of a problem when they’re meant to depend on physics, gravity, inertia and timing. It has the side-effect of making the challenges feel prescriptive, as if there is only one solution. Superficially this works in your favour, but wresting control away robs you of your agency at the key bits where you want discretion over when to speed up or slow down. You see, your avatar’s speed is dropped from running to walking pace automatically when in close proximity to the drones. There are many tasks that depend on split-second timing, where you have to flip a box into the right position then scurry around the drones’ cones of sight with a timing and precision that isn’t always easy to achieve. Pivoting your game around a small set of factors is a very clean approach, but it is limited and - I got to feeling - sometimes unfair. Other aspects are added to the environment as the game goes on - force field walls, teleport tubes, elevating platforms - but the variables remain largely the same: sneak around bamboozle the AI don’t get caught. The gap between success and failure is often measured in millimetres. As the puzzles mostly revolve around distracting the cameras so you can squeeze past them, timing is crucial. Starting off simple, these tasks pretty quickly escalate into stern tests of your psychic mettle. Neon-lined boxes can be extruded from the floor and walls, then placed or thrown to activate buttons or distract your electronic overseers’ attention. Your input is deliberately limited, meaning your brain (rather than your avatar) has to do the heavy lifting. These intimidating arenas are presided over by security drones, pivoting like CCTV cameras, that gate-keep your progress through the unforgiving, sterile environments. Wandering around this hub, you explore ruined buildings that transport you to strange, hi-tech worlds full of vertiginous heights and floating platforms. Taking visual cues from the likes of RiME, you play a young girl marooned on a Greco-paradisiacal island. Ever Forward is the latest intelligent and attractive platform-and-environmental head scratcher that feels engineered to make me look dumb. If life is going too well and I want to knock myself down a peg or two, I play a puzzle game.
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