The 80s was a fantastic time to be interested in computers. Everything was new, fresh and exciting. No-one had discovered the Unreal 3 Engine in all its Vaseline-smeared glory and everyone but EVERYONE who was the slightest bit interested in games was busily creating their own masterpiece in their bedroom when they weren't grappling with their joystick in all its euphemistic glory.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, you may remember a game called Mr Robot And His Robot Factory. It looked like this:
Mr Robot from Moonpod has nothing to do with this game. But around a similar time that old-school Mr Robot was clanking around his rather-impractical robot factory, we also got games like this:
Mr Robot has everything to do with this game. For those of you banging your heads going "I remember that! Now what the hell was it called?" - it's called Chimera, and it was just one of many games which adopted the then-relatively-unique isometric 3D perspective, allowing games to be sort-of-3D-without-having-to-do-that-difficult-polygon-thing. These games - and there were plenty of them, Rare's former incarnation as Ultimate Play The Game being particularly renowned for them - were generally well-known for being sprawling adventures that were a little more complex than the traditional "run, jump, shoot, repeat" mantra of so many other titles. No, these were proper graphical adventure games that often incorporated elements of action and platform games as well, making them early examples of genre-bending - a concept we're well familiar with now as developers desperately attempt to avoid the cries of "Unoriginal!" from the peanut gallery.
But enough of the history lesson. I've gone this far without even saying anything about the game this article is supposed to be about. Well, here's the thing. I actually have. Mr Robot is an unashamed homage to games like Chimera - it plays from an isometric 3D perspective, it incorporates adventure, action, puzzle, platforming and RPG elements, it's big, it's challenging and it's cheap. The only differences between it and the older games are the number of colours on screen at any one time and the fact it doesn't come on a cassette tape.
Mr Robot tells the story of Asimov, a general purpose robot aboard the starship Eidolon. Asimov, being a robot, is constantly bossed around by the ship's computer, known as HEL. (You know where this is going already, right?) Shortly after a few tutorial puzzles - which, I might add, do a great job of hiding the fact you're taking part in a tutorial - HEL starts behaving somewhat strangely, and it's up to Asimov and the other robots on the ship to find out what is going on before something nasty happens to all the humans in cryo-sleep.
It's a story we've heard before - System Shock has done it before, and much better - but the story is not really the main point of the game. The fact that there actually is a story presented throughout the course of the game is a noticeable advancement from the 8-bit era games, which tended to have their entire plot summarised on the back of the cassette case - but, as with those older titles, the main point of playing Mr Robot is to enjoy the fiendish puzzles set for you by the designers rather than enjoy a complex narrative.
The puzzles generally take one of several types. There are switch puzzles, platform puzzles, avoid-the-nasty-killer-robots puzzles, block-pushing puzzles and crane puzzles. There's enough different types to keep things interesting, and they're never so difficult that you get frustrated with the game and want to give up. A convenient "Reset Room" command in the game's menu allows you to try again without penalty if you do find you pushed something into a place you shouldn't have, but even then, many rooms have been designed carefully enough to cut this down to a minimum. The puzzles themselves may be clichéd - we've been pushing blocks around for years, after all - but what a child of the 80s such as myself constantly thinks while playing is "well - that's how it should be". And despite the 80s style of the game, the developers do tip their hat to modern design philosophy by incorporating a save system (yes - you had to complete games like Chimera in one sitting) and automap, meaning those of you who were reaching for the graph paper in the first few paragraphs can just put it away before anyone sees.
Things get interesting when you reach a computer terminal or land on the head of an enemy robot. At this point, you have the opportunity to take part in a "ghost hack".
Moving around an abstract representation of the computer's circuitry, you pass through a number of different "nodes", some of which are populated by security software and routines. Should you encounter one of these pieces of software, you find yourself thrust into a turn-based battle reminiscent of the early Final Fantasy games, of all things. This sudden jump in gameplay style is jarring at first, but after a while you begin to accept it as one of the game's quirks - and thankfully, the battle system is solid, visually appealing and doesn't take too long to kill anything in. More notably, there is absolutely no need whatsoever to level grind, since there are only a relatively limited number of different enemies you will encounter while hacking. To put this in context: I was level 6 by the end of the game, I hadn't taken part in any battles I didn't need to and I had no problem defeating the final boss.
I will say now, however, that the ending sucked. Towards the end of the story, they started going into interesting existential territory on the subject of what it means to be sentient, but this wasn't explored in any great detail and after the finale there were a whole bunch of loose ends just left hanging. I would have been more annoyed about this had the story been a key part of the game but, as I said before, the most important thing about Mr Robot is the experience of actually playing it, and the satisfaction of solving a puzzle and making progress - not a jaw-dropping narrative.
Mr Robot is worth playing for its sheer audacity. To shamelessly bring back an all-but forgotten game genre from the 1980s in the 21st century takes balls. To cram your whole game into less than 60MB takes some serious design chops. It's not a perfect game - that small file size comes from a lot of repeated textures and some quite dull music, and there's some niggly grammatical and spelling errors in the dialogue, and the controls are as awkward as they always were - though at least they are customizable. But these are minor issues in an otherwise decent game. It's probably not for everyone - those who just want to blast everything in sight will get frustrated by the puzzles, those who want a good story will be disappointed and those who want a platform game may find the isometric perspective tricky. But even if you are one of those people mentioned, it's still worth giving the game a try, and supporting an independent developer who have a lot of potential.
Developer Moonpod are on to a good thing here and with their other titles, so I can only hope that their games' appearance on Steam allows them to reach the audience they deserve.
