4.2 KiB
| title | date | score | game_release_year | howlongtobeat_id | howlongtobeat_hrs | game_name | game_developer | game_genre | tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freaky Trip: A Bizarre But Buggy Diversion | 2023-10-13T10:00:00+01:00 | 1 | 2023 | -1 | 1.5 | Freaky Trip | Red Deer Games | Adventure |
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Go through untypically typical places and solve totally absurd riddles on your rescue mission. That's Freaky Trip's premise according to developer and publisher Red Deer Games. Given the single screen point & click nature to solve these freaky puzzles, that almost sounds like a Gobliiins game! My wife found this one in the Nintendo Switch eStore during an indie showcase. For just for $1.99 , we were more than eager to put on our adventurous shoes and find out whether or not it was worth tripping out on.
Freaky Trip---whether or not the "trip" part refers to a short hike or getting stoned, I still don't know, but judging from the gameplay, it could just as well be both at the same time---is a (very) short single screen puzzle/adventure game where you, a purple long-nosed blocky flap-eared thing, freak out because your friend the chick disappeared while you were making breakfast. Or something like that. Each screen is portrayed as a bizarre but consistent enough step towards retrieving that lost friendship.
As you can see in the screenshots, Freaky Trip's usage of vibrant pastel-like colors and seemingly vector-based digital artwork gives the game a unique (and freaky? or trippy?) feel. Even the world map and main menu is drawn using these constraints. Most scenes are stuffed with things to look at, but unfortunately, only a few can effectively be interacted with, which is conveyed to the player with a visual cue from the purple hand pointer that changes into a grabbing pose.
How do you solve puzzles in Freaky Trip? There's no inventory. It's just a matter of starting to click on things that fancy your attention. Some objects can be held and used or combined with others. Cancelling that action simply results in putting the object back where it came from. The single static (non-scrolling) screen further drastically reduces your options here, and even if there are 14 screens to go through, these can all be finished in under two hours. We felt puzzles to be either underwhelming or ridiculously freaky. The first one, Lucid Dreams, for example, immediately sets the scene: you have no idea what the game is expecting from you. Just sheer random luck got us to the next one, which after a few minutes of fiddling sometimes ends in a low note ("oh huh, okay?").
Unfortunately, the "absurd riddles" are served with numerous bugs and a wonky interface, further confusing the player on what to do. In one level, we had to check luggage contents, but one of the bags didn't disappear and kept floating above a machine, indicating we had to do something with it. It turns out that after resetting the game, that wasn't supposed to happen. In another scene, we had to press X three times on each object before our purple freak wanted to interact with them. In yet another level, progress was completely blocked because something disappeared. If that's part of the freaky trip, I want to snap out of it.
We felt that Freaky Trip didn't receive enough play testing to see whether or not players were able to easily learn the controls and mechanics of the game. We're not exactly newcomers to the genre, but the combination of nasty bugs, difficult to discern static background vs. dynamic object, and UI hickups made it damn difficult to get that trip on the road. Oh, and it contains an unskippable sliding puzzle, have fun with that.
And that's a shame, because additional polish could have made this a much more enjoyable experience, however short the game is. In its current state, I'd rather recommend Frog's Adventure to people looking for tiny wholesome adventures. Less freaky, but also less buggy. The choice is yours.