Developer: Studio Plane Toast | Released: 2024 | Genre: Adventure, Third Person
This was an easy and relaxing third person adventure roaming a small open world with Sauge, a girl looking for her lost sister. It became a distant goal as she first had to disable various jamming devices in the area to populate a map. To help her out, an old lady lent her a van that even had upgrade options. The first upgrade was an antenna that made it possible to spot a jamming device in a structure.
The game reminded me of Sable, another free roaming open world exploration game that also featured a vehicle across deserts and random structures to climb. However, it was considerably easier on the puzzles and tasks. Sauge met a few NPC in a couple of outposts and did get quests for helping them out, but for the most part they were usually just fetch tasks. Most of the game was about exploring.
It was also impossible to die. The van couldn’t crash (although it could get stuck and an option for resetting it to the garage then popped up) and there was no fall damage at all. It also had a hotkey for returning to the van no matter how far I had run off, and another for returning to the garage in the first outpost. It was all so very convenient but also almost felt like too much of a good thing.
The game also forced you to revisit the same structures several times. The first time I visited e.g. a terminal or a tower, there were doors I needed a van upgrade to remove, or ropes I needed a pulley to slide on. I just had to come back later. Such gated design can feel like Metroidvania when done well, but in this game it felt more like backtracking. Luckily, it never took long to get back on top of most structures.
It was a good thing the exploration and the van upgrades kept me engaged, because the story and dialog didn’t. Most of the dialog felt like it went on for twice as many speech bubbles as it had to, and the story was kind of just there to make the van upgrades make sense.
The dialog bubbles wrote out text along with cute click sounds instead of speech. I’ve seen that idea used before and it’s a good one. The clicks differed depending on the type of NPC, Sauge was talking to.
Some quests required that the NPC rode along in the van. A cyan line was then shown on the road.
It was really weird with no fall damage. Sauge could fall from the highest tower, and the ground just shook for a second and then she could just run along like nothing happened. I wish they had followed good examples from games such as Portal and gave her a device to explain why it was no big deal.
Some quests had black screen cut scenes because the developers couldn’t be bothered to animate it. Then I just saw speech bubbles and heard a few sounds effects. At other times it showed frozen 3D scenes.
It was cute that other NPC could comment in the toaster messages. One big community listening in.
One of the later quests used components for adding a new paint job for the van. I only tried the green one.
The most unexpected quest was the one where I helped a robot bury his son.
Every time Sauge constructed an upgrade for the van, she entered a VR simulation for testing it out.
Van upgrades:
- An antenna to detect jamming devices and other components.
- A grappling hook to pull out doors and also big boxes stuck in the sand.
- An antenna upgrade for hacking door pads.
- Throwing a rope to grab a holder on a roof for Sauge to slide up on.
- An energy plug for powering up sockets.
The game ended with a choice of two endings. I chose the imploding self-destruct ending.
But in spite of the lack of real challenge, the open world art and design was charming and the structures were often interesting enough to warrant exploration, even if everything was easy mode.