REVIEW : Resolutiion (PC)
Overview
An old gangster escorts a curious AI through confused combat, puzzling secrets, and unsettling calm in a dreamscape of lunatics and sane animals.
Resolution is a fast-paced action-adventure designed by two angry German siblings leading a band of vagrants who filled it with lovely pixels, dirty jokes, deep ideas and badassemotional songs for 20 hours of killing combat, satisfying exploration, and layered storytelling.
Explore a fractured future, collecting weird weaponry and stories, to piece together the past: a friend tricked, a family is broken, worlds at war.
To solve the puzzle of the Cradles take on a multi-cultural-mashup of sceptical gods, passionate machines, zealots, Luddites, and furry critters in a world that doesn’t mind if it confuses or kills you — oh hey, a kitty!
Features:
- 16-hour playtime
- Explore a gloomy cyberpunk universe where nothing is as it appears
- Experience a dark story where you might be the hero – or the villain
- Unlock new abilities to defeat your enemies
- Survive in brutal fights and crush gruesome bosses
- Listen to a badassemotional cyberpunk Soundtrack
GamePlay
Resolution is a stylish game. Its smooth-moving but highly pixelated art style evokes games like Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery, Below, and Hyper Light Drifter at a glance, but it has its thrown-together mix of cultural influences that create a unique setting. Its characters range from Buddhist monk labourers to talking deer and bunnies espousing subversive anti-imperialist rhetoric.
Its creatures come with simple, but cheeky and stylish, designs: There’s a desert town under threat from a giant black cat that swims under the nearby sand like a shark, whose cuteness remains hidden until right before it pounces to kill you. In another section, you’re chased by a crudely drawn “naga,” whose body–a long line of interconnected balls that looks like it was drawn in MS paint–looks more like a caterpillar than a snake. That’s not a condemnation–there’s a strong unified sensibility to the art that helps create the severity of the world, while also injecting a playfulness, that keeps your mind open and your curiosity piqued.
These spaces, from fallen skyscrapers to the bottom of the sea to a mysterious “lost” forest where your map doesn’t work, are familiar at their core, though. So much of Resolution feels like that–stylish in an interesting way, but familiar. Like so many Metroidvania action games, Resolution guides you through its world in a linear fashion, gradually opening up new spaces to you as you find new abilities. You will find yourself frequently bumping into areas you can’t access unless you come back later once you’ve acquired the appropriate tool.
Many of these are obvious key-and-keyhole pairings, but sometimes the answers may be less obvious. There’s a neat little interaction if you bring the giant sand-shark cat a “treat,” for example. Some of these hidden puzzles can be solved with common sense, while others require you to ignore and actively avoid the little bit of instructional guidance you’ve received. Many of them, however, require you to pay close attention to every shred of the story told and shown to you.
The conversations you have, the world’s design–everything pushes you to ask questions and seek a harder-to-attain hidden truth. These unmarked puzzles, combined with the complete lack of any explanation of how any aspect of the game works, left me constantly in search of meaning in every nook and cranny. So many aspects of this game push you to look beyond what you’re doing and see a bigger picture, so I was constantly looking for subversive paradigm-shifting puzzles.
A keen eye and thorough play will help you find some answers–in some cases, it led me to find new story moments and Easter eggs–but there’s a big gap between recognizing a puzzle and figuring out how to engage with it. Too often, the understanding that there were puzzles I could see, but not approach, led to paranoia. I questioned every action because there’s little indication of when I was making hidden progress or shutting the door on something.
This is especially true in combat. Every non-boss enemy enters a wounded state when they’re one hit away from death, so it’s up to you whether or not to kill your opponents or let them live. The mere presence of the concept means every fight ends with a loaded moral question, and the game isn’t shy about pushing you to consider the consequences of your actions. It isn’t exactly clear what impact killing enemies have on the story, so it may or may not be a big deal.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 7
- Processor: 1.0 GHz
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL ES 3.0+ Compatible Card
- Storage: 1 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: 2.0 GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL ES 3.0+ Compatible Card
- Storage: 1 GB available space
