Here we have a game I picked up on a whim when Epic Games gave it away as one of their free titles of the week. It had that kind of trailer that suggested behind the bright colors and cozy vibe, it might just hide something darker for the observant gamer to pick up on. And to be fair, that kind of feel usually gets at at least a curiosity glance. This time, maybe I should have just left it at that glance.
Story: You bring your ship to board an abandoned vessel owned by the Filament corporation. Why you are here is not made clear to you, the player, but your character clearly intends to land, overriding safety protocols trying to keep you 200 miles away from the ship (including an apparent captcha test to click all asteroids and confirm you are human). However, the ship does not seem quite as abandoned as you might initially think. Within the first few rooms, someone stuck here and going by the name of "Juniper" notices you and immediately asks for help. She's been trapped for a long time in the cockpit of this ship (which turns out to be named the Alabaster) with no way to control the massive machine. Your random arrival may just be the spark of hope she needs since the devices (called anchors) holding her prisoner are strewn about the ship and out of her reach. You, however, can disable them to set her free. Whatever your mission was, it's direction has changed. You are now here to rescue a poor trapped soul and escape this doomed ship.... or so it seems.
The story is literally the reason I kept playing this game at all, not so much because of the goal shifting, but what the background to it might mean. Basically all of the story telling will be given to you either by the monologs of Juniper as she tells you about the events leading up to her predicament (and if you find specific interaction points, inside scoops on the ship or even just details of life before the big events as well), doing her best to keep you company from the speakers. However hers is not the only story here.
As you play, you will find yourself possessing grid-like passwords that when used with a terminal will grant you access to the history of the crew in the form of log entries they made and email/instant message conversations they had. And while these tell a similar story to what Juniper is saying, it's also not exactly the same. You can decide for yourself if this is intentional or not (on either Juniper or the developers themselves) but the total picture starts to suggest a disaster aboard the research ship you are on with massive "what the hell" moments that genuinely kept me wanting to learn more.
Unfortunately the end results of this quest are vague at best, and to explain why it left me unsatisfied, I am going to have to spoil the ending of the one real strong point this game had going for me. As always if you do not wish to be spoiled, please skip past the indented and italicized portion below:
When you reach the end of the game you find the pilot seat empty and the person talking to you is literally still looking at you with a camera and a screen. Juniper had just asked you to meet her, suggesting she may not be real but just an AI. At which point she tells you she is sorry she is forced to do this and the ship goes into evacuation mode... but before you can escape, your screen glitches out and suddenly you are in a house, your arms gone up to your elbows and the door unlocked. Leaving you find yourself on the beach with a bunch of other people... presumably members of the team... and roll credits.
This rather obscure way to end the game is designed to not explain the actual ending but to leave you to interpret it yourself, thinking back on your adventure. Thorough the notes collected you find references that the planet the ship was sent to review for human expansion is a hologram and whatever is inside it is sending radiation out in massive waves. This got exceptionally dangerous when one of the crew members disappeared during one leaving just their clothes and augmentations (robotic hands) behind. This is worth noting because your character ALSO has such hands, so to see such a drastic change suggests the warning the ship gave was another such wave and you just fell to the same fate, putting a rather darker tone on the light and airy ending you get thrown so abruptly into.
But that's only one interpretation... you could just as easily go with the "I read this whole story on the internet then just went outside" as the whole story, and small details that didn't seem to make sense in how things appeared onboard the ship starts to do otherwise, or even that captcha at the beginning goes from being a joke on the game to a hint to support your theory. And you could probably come up with a lot more and not necessarily be wrong. It just feels unsatisfying to be told "what do you think?" like that.
So while I do appreciate the ability to tell a story through exploring and uncovering clues while you play the game I just wish the ending lived up to the slow burn building it.
7/10
Graphics: Filament will reveal it's world as a top-down game with relatively simple aesthetics, outside of the opening cutscene, anyway. But you will be viewing two distinct "worlds" like this: your character's surroundings and the puzzles.
When you are playing as your character, you will be wandering around the insides of the Alabaster which is surprisingly varied. When you think what the insides of a deep space travel vessel might look like, you probably think either dirty and grimy like a ship from the Alien series of movies, pristine and clinical like many try to make a science fiction future look, or maybe you just think of the Star Ship Enterprise (whichever one you grew up with). The layout here is all of the above and none of them at the same time.
You will find engine rooms that look messy right along side a medical pay kept well and even warm open recreational places that would fit right at home in some 1980s mansion, if not for the neon-colored planet outside the windows. And yet it all meshes together as a whole, telling the daily life of the people who lived here studying that world, both when they had work to do and their downtime. Add to that details like a random basketball still on the court or what looks at first like a kid's pillow fort and turns out to be a makeshift bar hidden in the dark corner of one of the rooms (away from top brass, I'm sure) and you get that lived in feeling you should for a place that housed a close knit group while they spent months on their mission together.
I can not, however, be so kind to the inhabitance of that world... which thankfully, I only caught a glimpse of once in the whole game before the faceless models at the very end... but based on that, it was clearly the better choice. It looks pretty good that way on the models, and much better then the generic shape based design they used on the photo ID of one of the characters I found. Seriously if you think "generic internet 2D animation" or "Magic Spoon cereal box" you are on the right track, but somehow it's even uglier, like the people who make those would have rejected this as not good enough even for them. Still it was a single image in the entire game, so while the shock of how ugly it looked actually left me stunned for a moment, I won't hang up on it beyond being glad they left it to that small detail.
But to get back to the world, we have only covered what is effectively a very nice looking overworld map, which as I said, feels varied, warm, and lived in. All the warmth goes away for the most part, however, when you reach the meat of the game: the puzzles. When playing these you change views to controlling a little robot in various rooms (usually grey, occasionally themed depending on the rules of the specific puzzle type you are looking at). But while not every room has personality, the robot you control seems to have more then just about everything else in this game. It's simple, has no arms or even a moving face, but it scampers along with a dutiful energy that just makes you want to route on for the little guy. They somehow nailed his design perfectly.
7/10
Sound: This is not a game that is going to give you a lot of sound effects to work with. Outside of the beeps and boops of computers you type on to unlock archives of or devices activating during puzzles, there really isn't much here.
What is here is a music score that is designed to generally inspire a calm relaxing world. It gives off a vibe you might think of looking out at the stars on a clear night, staring up in quiet awe at the magnificence in front of you... and this make sense since this whole game takes place in a ship sent out to study and explore the far flung reaches of space in the hopes of finding a new world mankind can expand to and colonize. It carries that energy that still lingers on the ship even though the crew is gone. It is also a necessary salve when you are working on the puzzles of the game since they can be quite difficult, but we will get into that later. Suffice it to say, it sounds good and works with the world well.
The only other thing to talk about is the voice acting, of which there is a lot even though it's from basically a single person. Your character is a silent protagonist, leaving all the talking to Juniper... and she unfortunately comes off more as a plot device then a person most of the time. She is supposed to be the ship pilot stuck in the cockpit for weeks and desperate to get out. But instead of desperate for help, I get the vibe of someone just really wanting someone to hear her story of how she got there. She's calm, sarcastic, opinionated, and even excited to share her favorite moments. It's not bad, really. In fact she can tell some tales that actually feel lived in. But this isn't someone desperate to get out of the ship. This is someone desperate for a companion. But hey, maybe that goes with the vibe and "offness" that the story seems to hide details about. I'm not gonna complain though. She is again, a reason to keep going and find out more when the next section is going to put a lot of people off.
8/10
Gameplay: And this is sadly where the game just didn't do it for me. In essence your goal is to unlock the anchor systems throughout the ship, which you will do by solving the game's puzzles. These puzzles involve navigating a robot that trails a glowing filament through a room so as to activate all the appropriate points by touching them. (How this works to disable high tech hardware is beyond me.) This may sound simple, but any line you have placed is effectively a wall, requiring you to think about how you navigate the room to complete this goal. And the integrated layouts would be enough to make this challenging, but it isn't long before this simple mechanic is spiced up with things like "dark nodes" that touching will cause your line to go dark and no longer be able to power the required nodes. Or it another node could change it's color as required to activate other specific nodes There are many other mutations the game will throw in the mix long before it is done in an attempt to make the game more varied, but this is ultimately where I found myself losing interest.
This is a massive game with hundreds of puzzles available to you, but with the entire game being this kind of string puzzle at it's core, I found myself personally just losing interest before I was half-way through the required number to finish it (and groaning that the grand finale was also several additional such puzzles on it's own... by that point, I just wanted to see how it all ended). Add to that patience draining scenario how difficult they can be and you have a recipe for disaster.
Still there is nothing here that is not doable, so if this kind of puzzle fits your taste more then mine, you will probably get a lot more out of the gameplay then I did, and maybe even be delighted with it. For me, though, I literally dragged myself through this on the strength of wanting to figure out the plot alone. I did not find this a fun time.
5/10
Bugs: It has been a while since we have had a game that didn't run like a top. But of course, when its a game that only holds my attention really due to it's story, it has to crash completely to the desktop just before the end of the game. Thankfully the autosave saved the day and I could just restart the absolute ending, but for a moment, I thought I was going to just get pissed off.. rather then just making that ending feel that much more hollow.
Digital Rights Management: While my copy of this game is DRM free, it is not always the case. Specifically if you are playing through Steam, you will need to use Steam to play. Any other copy of the game will work just fine with or without running the platform you installed it from.
Source: PC Gaming Wiki
Overall: Simply put this was not a game for me. The world and premise was too interesting for me to leave without finding out what was going on, but the game itself was a slog to make it through rather then a joy to play... and the payoff there was hollow at best. This is also obviously not going to be a universal view because if you like the string-style puzzles the game offers, you will get a lot more out of the gameplay then I ever would. But for me, I have to walk away with a hard "do not recommend."
Score:
System Requirements:
- Any quad-core processor
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 745 or AMD Radeon HD 6870 (1 GB VRAM)
- 4 GB RAM
- Windows 7,8, or 10 (64-bit only)
- 1 GB hard drive space
System Specs:
- Ryzen 5 5600G running at 3.9 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 11
- PDP DX Wired Controller (Crimson)
Source: EpicGames
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