I remember when this game came out. At the time it looked interesting for being a horror inside a digital world and promising to be something completely different. I picked it up on a summer sale and this year as part of the 100 Days of Gaming for Extra Life, the game came up. Did I enjoy it? Yeah, I did… but I’m not sure it was as good as I expected it to be. Come on in.
Story: You logged in, but it didn’t work right. Memories flash before your eyes in rapid succession, but in between them a strange icon starts to appear… and then it’s over. You are on the train you were supposed to ride into the virtual world known as the “Soul Cloud.” But something is clearly wrong. The train is broken, it’s cars stacked together as you fall out of yours onto the deserted island below. What the fuck just happened?
With a little exploring, you will find yourself at the “employee entrance” to the Soul Cloud which will then explain what little premise the game gives you to start. You apparently work here, helping maintain the system from the inside.
So what is this place and what do you do exactly? Well an employee orientation video fills you in on that, telling you the Soul Cloud is basically a memory depository for those who have died. Upon death, your loved ones can have you rushed off where your mind is not allowed to die, but downloaded into this machine where you can have an eternal afterlife in virtual reality, your best memories always in reach to relive as you desire. You are also while in this state, reachable by your loved ones who can plug into this world and visit you, so death is never a barrier again. Your job is basically to be the landlord for these souls.
But something is definitely wrong in paradise. For one, that train would have been the main means everyone logs in to visit the deceased… and two, someone else is here… someone who means to see you never get out of here alive yourself.
With this basic premise in place, you will be left inside the memories of one of your tenants, pulling clues out of her memories stored here as you try to restore them for reasons that the plot will explain when you finish and begin the home stretch. And that is perhaps the biggest issue this game has with plot.
What is here is interesting and will keep you going as you fill in the gaps of the memories you are wandering though, but your part in them are kept a secret from you until that moment when the entire tone and pace of the game changes. This would be ok if you were actually supposed to have amnesia like I had assumed when I started this game. But as I put down my mouse, I don’t think that was the case. Rather it seems like the game decided to leave out important points of the plot like the devs were afraid if you knew what you should have known, it wouldn’t be as impactful when they told you. And while these moments did make themselves noticeable, I don’t think this was the best decision. I would have erred on the side of making sense sooner and using that as more of a hook to keep the player interested. Weird can be fun, but it can also confuse and make a player not want to keep going.
6/10
Graphics: Unfortunately the look of this game seems to be a bit all over the place. Most of the game will show you a first person view of the worlds you will play in, ranging from your deserted island to a hub-city, to everything from a creepy as hell forest with a circus hidden in it, to being the size of a doll in a young girl’s playroom. The range of places you will see is absolutely insane. And most of them look really good, taking on a “synthetic” aesthetic to bring home that this is all within a computer. But that hub city which you be traversing to get to the memories you are working with looks all the weaker because of it… and you do keep coming back to it as a hub. It looks high-tech, but also kinda lazy in that 1990s background for kids cartoons way. Look at the city building windows and you will see exactly what I’m saying.
Still, even if it’s the most common place, it is only one place. But the best are much more numerous. The synthesized look is also fairly minimalist, and the devs behind this game knew how to use that to make the world itself ooze with pure unease. Stand outs here are the carnival, and the hospital, which will keep you on edge, even if they are simply not that challenging. The atmosphere the visuals help create really are that effective.
And that’s before we get to the blatant influence the “other” has. Throughout the game you will find the icon from the opening hidden about the maps. Using one will instantly plaster a painting over your screen of some horrific visage and a message from them about how your soul is forfeit and you will pay dearly for it. It’s straight up messages of terror and I absolutely loved the “cold steak in the face” shock the first time I found one… and most of the art-work after is still really good!
Unfortunately, the story element did not hold up so well… as when you finish with a memory you get to see it for yourself, which is then done in a a 2D cartoon that frankly looks like fan-art more then anything professional. It may be a sign of where the budget went, but it definitely pulls you out of the moment till you get used to seeing it.
7/10
Sound: Depending on where you are, the game will use background noise or music to set the tone, and this is something the game uses very well. When there is no music, the world sets it’s tone perfectly, be it a simple walk outdoors or the threat of things laughing behind your back, the game knows how to use it. And often the music tends to be relatively simple, using jarring tones to ramp up the tension when you are running for your life or in a place you simply know you should not be (often working in tandem with the visuals mentioned above incredibly well).
Which is a good thing as there is very little actual sound effects in this game to go over these backgrounds. You are visiting someone else’s memory, and you do so alone, so there is little in the way of others making noise of any kind in the game. Just you, your footsteps, and the things you open and use. And while these are varied, they are sparse. The same is true of voice acting, as there are maybe a handful of moments with it. Enjoy the voice explaining what you do in the training video, because you will not hear any other voices outside of laughter from the thing haunting you until almost the end of the game. It is good, but the devs chose not to use it very much.
Still what is here is amazingly effective in all categories.
9/10
Gameplay: Master Reboot is a horror story told through an FPS puzzle game. You will run around various worlds, many of which represent big moments in the life of the woman who’s memories you will be forced to fix in the process of fixing your own way out. This can vary from finding the lights needed to let a circus open it’s main tent to finding keys hidden around a giant version of a little girl’s room so you can open the closet the memory was locked away in.
While you do this, dangers in this world are represented by menacing things lurking around these maps as well which if you get caught will kill you instantly. But they tend to be things easily avoided for the most part, and death quickly becomes a secondary concern the moment it happens the first time. There is no game over so much as your mind just gets reloaded for you to try again within just a few seconds. This game is not hard, but rather offers tension by pure atmosphere most of the time. This is exceptionally true when you find the boss encounters smattered about the game.
6/10
Bugs: I found absolutely zero bugs while playing this game. It ran perfectly.
Overall: Master Reboot is a simple game focused much more on atmosphere and dropping pieces of a puzzle to figure out then challenging the player with anything more then occasionally doing something fast enough and one moment of sneaking around. This is not a game for someone looking to challenge themselves so much as one who wants to get lost in a creepy world and get spooked while they figure out just what the hell is going on. But the game does this surprisingly well.
But it’s still not a great game. While the moment to moment works well for the creepy effect of the game, the story telling prevents a cohesive picture from appearing till almost the end of the game, rendering your reason for being there in the dark for much longer then it should be.
In the end, I would recommend checking this game out if the concept of the soul cloud peaks your interest, but do so on sale since you can find spooky games that are much more coherent then this..
Score:
6/10
System Requirements:
- Intel Core2 Duo or AMD Athalon64 x2
- 2 GB RAM
- Shader Model 3/Direct X 9.0c compatible GPU (so basically anything on a card and probably any non-Intel APUs will work… maybe Intel’s built in graphics as well)
- Windows XP, Vista, or 7
- 2 GB of hard drive sapce
System Specs:
- AMD FX 8350
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 960 with 4GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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