REVIEW : Waking (PC)
There are games out there that try to do something no other game can replicate. It’s a tough feat. After all, if a developer could just whip up a unique selling point that easily, every game you played would feel different from the last. Of course, we know that isn’t how the industry works and seldom trying to force an exceptional design can backfire. This is the problem Jason Oda’s Waking fundamentally suffers from.
Waking’s internal fight
Waking is a third-person battle game with a narrative twist. In-game you play yourself in a deep coma nearing the afterlife. After being permitted to ascend to the afterlife, you deny it to fight for something more important.
The levels in Waking are effectively parts of your buried conscience. It’s a wild concept that is absolutely worth watching into, but its execution is up for debate.
Throughout the game, your skills and party features are built based upon your real-life events. Afterwards, the game adds a follower to your party encouraged by your real-life furry friend.
Given how easily gamers can get attached to pets in other games, you can assume how cool it was to see my very own cute little West Highland Terrier running alongside you.
The options for appearance are limited. One of the presets happened to look like a Westie, but other breeds don’t get representation. It’d be frustrating to try and immerse yourself and then realize you can’t even have an accurate version of your dear pet running alongside you.
Regardless, the idea of living your own story is interesting. People’s lives vary in far too many ways for a video game to ever cover. And that’s something that hurt the ability to truly engage in Waking‘s narrative.
Getting lost in the mindscape
Perhaps the most frustrating gameplay element of Waking is the game’s inability to offer meaningful direction. The way levels are laid out and interlink to one another makes traversing them harder than it needs to be. This issue gets worse the further on in the game you get.
What’s strange is that Waking does sometimes offer a clear objective at the bottom of the screen — but not all the time and that objective sometimes don’t even update properly when completed. Worst of all is Waking‘s overreliance on colours for its map interface.
Fight for your life
Despite its relaxed, thoughtful design philosophy, the core gameplay of Waking is founded on fast-paced action. Both boss fights and brawls alike rely on the player staying on the move constantly whilst using various weapons to deal damage.
Your basic kit consists of a ranged projectile attack, a rapid melee attack, and the various abilities you collect from progressing through the story. Some of these abilities are just straight-up damage dealers whilst others are summons and support spells.
There’s a decent variety in fights, with some requiring defensive play styles where you must deflect shots back to eliminate an enemy. Others are more straightforward, tasking you with stunning an enemy and then meleeing them before they get back up.
Whilst these mechanics hardly reinvent the genre, they are always capable enough to avoid hindering Waking‘s selling point, its story.
Every time you melee, it uses a charge-up that is built up by absorbing fragments dropped by enemies. Running out of melee mid-fight feels unnecessarily irritating whilst not adding much to the experience.
Visuals and performance
It’s hard to criticize the visuals of Waking. This is a beautiful indie play that showcases the very best in autonomous art talent the industry has to offer. It’d be difficult to find a screenshot of Waking where you couldn’t make it your desktop background.
Some areas are a little too dark for my tastes, but that does play in well with the whole coma narrative. And to be fair, a lot of the game is still bright, albeit not overly colourful. The greatest spectacle Waking has to offer is its boss fights that are a wonderful mix of stunning lighting effects and beautifully crafted environments.
Given these high-quality visuals, you might have some concerns regarding Waking‘s performance, but there’s little to worry about. The average FPS on my RTX 2060 levelled out at around 120. During more intense, action-heavy segments this dipped as low as 78 FPS, but these are few and far between. During gradual cinematic sections, Waking consistently managed well over 200 FPS.
