As a matter of fact it only crashed once, although – considering its relative length – that may be one time too many. I've been having a bit of trouble with this business ever since Day One widened my perspective on how hideously broken a game can be and still get a review score, and as a direct result, while Master Reboot is not a bug-free game by any means, I no longer feel obliged to burn it at the stake for every little transgression it commits. What's next on the big nasty game reviewer list? Performance, right. “Now where's the button to get me out of here?” “Well, seen all that,” I found myself thinking, within moments of entering the level. Some of the abstract areas are really quite pretty, laced with colourful lighting effects and such, but with no context and – often – nothing to actually do in them, they more often than not left me wanting. So, while Master Reboot's aesthetic might provide at some respite from current gen graphics, the novelty quickly wears thin, and the distorted polygon fantasy begins to shred immersion like an enraged combine harvester in a paper mill. Going to a job interview dressed as a theme park mascot might make you stand out from the crowd, but it doesn't make you any better qualified to handle bank transactions. Non-committal terms like 'unique' are sure to be thrown at it, just like anything that isn't shooting for photorealism or aping Minecraft, but being unique doesn't mean anything. Broadly speaking it's like a Saturday morning cartoon viewed through the lens of a student's Unity project all twisted proportions, bright colours and flat shaded polygons. Three hours from beginning to end, so if you're hoping for a time-sink then you might want to look elsewhere.

Still, an indie game with a budget as minuscule as this can be forgiven for padding its playing time a bit, surely? Suit yourself, but when the game is still shorter than a bonfire night on Io it starts to beg the question on whether it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board until you have some more ideas. When your actions have no obvious meaning and the results have no reward beyond opening up your path in completely unrelated ways, the endless loop of input and output that's integral to gaming grinds to a hold, leaving you doing a collection of pointless tasks for no other reason than the implicit assurance that completing them will advance you to the next part of the game. Pack up and go home, we've resorted to pop science quiz questions.Ĭreating a lack of a logical continuity between the puzzles and the rest of the gameplay might have been a deliberate choice on Master Reboot's part in order to enforce the dream-like state of the game's environments, and I suppose if you want to look at it that way then it certainly succeeds, in the same way that a man with a pizza cutter, a bottle of whiskey and some perseverance might 'succeed' at performing his own gastrectomy.

Many take the form of more thrice-damned scavenger hunts – you know, because nothing raises the tension like being forced to backtrack and meticulously search through an already-visited area – but some just seem to be looking to waste your time, like the one that asks you to shoot down a set of unmoving targets with your perfectly accurate cork gun or – and I'm not making this up – makes you demonstrate the order of the planets in the solar system. The definition of 'puzzles', though, and their relevance to the actual game environment, is stretched until you could tie it between two goalposts and use it as a catapult. Platforming shows up occasionally, like an old friend that you don't really talk to any more, but the main arbitrary gameplay element at work is puzzles. I can picture the developers clutching their heads in despair as they tried to think of gameplay elements to add to their spook-em-up, before throwing their arms in the air and just slotting anything in anywhere it would fit. Perhaps the pacing could have been saved if Master Reboot had actually been conceived as a game rather than a slightly offbeat haunted house ride.

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