REVIEW : Loopmancer (PC)
You have at least a dozen chances to change your mind about the game in the first few hours spent with Loopmancer. The development team, eBrain Studio, immediately sets a lot, a lot on fire in a rather confusing manner, and it is thus entirely possible that the player’s reactions and feelings change significantly from one moment to the next, whenever you taste for the first time one of the very savoury ingredients poured into the cauldron.
The game is cloaked in roguelike subtleties before breaking down into the most vulgar and visceral action, builds a fascinating cyberpunk context before demolishing it with ideas ranging from kitsch to the purest trash, and attempts to create a narrative focused on themes dear to the futuristic genre before throwing away any pretence of seriousness, between gang wars, corporate delusions, lewd experiments, and all sorts of inventions that could help raise the rate of insanity
You almost get lost in this glittering succession of oddities and unusual, amusing as well as conceptual, but it gradually re-emerges, and you get to see clearly and piece together the parts of a production that is furiously incoherent. We not only accept the peculiarity, but we embrace it, and it is then that we discover our raison d’être: Loopmancer is everything we’ve just said and more, which is fine. It cannot leave you indifferent with such a strong and yet painfully naive identity.
The same story every day
It all starts when private detective Xiang Zixu is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a popular journalist as well as the mayor’s daughter in Dragon City, a Chinese megalopolis with breathtaking views (especially with active ray tracing) that serves as the main stage for the events described.
His hunt begins in one of the city’s most notorious locations, so he must punch his way through, a bottle, gunfire, and whatever else is required to get rid of the local gang’s thugs.
But, just as he is about to apprehend the boss, who should know something about the inexplicable disappearance and is, among other things, an old nemesis of Xiang, he is hit by a barrage of gunfire. Curtain.
Dark. ” Driiin ” awakens her. The highly personal version of Groundhog Day’s Xiang begins. He died when they made him sieve, although it’s unclear how the event created a time loop. Each departure brings a resurrection, and the research begins again with the new materials that man gradually acquires.
It is the perfect excuse to allow the narrative to frolic, throwing the detective, and with him the player, into a series of events decidedly outside the box, because it borders in the very short term in a ” locura ” that includes cybernetic ninjas, proud but slightly stupid samurai, hand-torn brains, organ trafficking, centenarian old women, mad scientists, and centenarian old women.
Overall, does it make sense? Probably not much, but it doesn’t matter because this mishmash of circumstances, inspirations, and topics all titillate the craving for trash that each of us possesses. What I appreciate best is that choosing one level over another has significant ramifications for the plot, replete with several endings. As a result, it is evident that some options are superior to others, and the reason for this can only be determined through play.
How was your day? You’re covered in blood
In truth, I was playing. The looping mechanism evidently also deeply connotes the playful system, which in general has the characteristics of a side-scrolling action platform, in which all that needs to be done is to kill everybody who comes in front of it and, on occasion, to solve some easy environmental riddle.
REVIEW : SENSEs: Midnight (PC)
