Duality

Duality is a first person 3D platforming puzzle game that focuses on solving puzzles by taking advantage of seamless dimensional rifts."  You mean...portals?  Oh dear, it's going to be one of those reviews, isn't it?  I thought I had my obligatory "this game is trying to be Portal review with Crystaline.  Well who knows, maybe this game will turn out to be original after all.

...nope.

Oh okay, fine, it's not exactly like Portal.  It also features dual-world gameplay (hence the title) so yeah nothing really too original to be seen here.  Oh well, just because the game's not terribly interesting doesn't mean it's not fun, right?

Well it's not boring, so that's good.  The levels are largely linear, leaving little room for the player to get lost.  The mechanics are functional and intuitive, the 3D world is really pretty and the music is enjoyable, especially when it fades from Dark World to Light World.  That said, why am I not particularly enthusiastic about this game?  It would be because there's simply not enough ingenuity or fun to be had to justify the little quirks about this game. The little things nipping at my heels would be perfectly acceptable if there was some sort of larger payoff, like if they were scraping the dead skin off my heels and making me look young again.  But as it stands, they're just pesky little annoyances that I'd rather kick into the next dimension.


For one thing, the bridges that you have to make for yourself are conveyed very poorly.  They're made out of glowing orbs that all form together to make one circular disk.  The problem is that it's impossible to tell at first glance where one disk begins and the other ends, leading to several moments like this:

This one in particular tricked me into falling into the lake below, which instantly teleported me to the beginning where I had to undo all my progress just to redo it again in.  Yeah, it's one of those games...

Another thing that grinds my gears is that in the third and final level, these moving portals are introduced.  They are never referred to again and they're completely obnoxious.  They don't add any level of challenge or depth, they just make you play the game at the game's pace, which is really annoying.  Remember Super Mario 64? That game knew how to implement moving platforms.  The player had to calculate the right moment to jump in order to progress.  It was challenging and fun.  The moving portals in Duality are neither of those.

And why is it that in the first 2 levels, the Light World's water turns into the Dark World's lava, but in the third level it's always water?  This whole game just feels a bit unfinished.  Not the broken kind of unfinished like Sonic '06, but the annoying "beta-build" feel that makes it seem like you're playtesting rather than playing.

Duality isn't terrible.  It had potential to be cool, albeit not very original, but it blew it with clumsy design.  The game as a whole isn't really that challenging.  All the puzzles are very simple, even the last one.  I was able to blow through all of them without even thinking, and I'm not usually very good at puzzle games.

Cool concept, sub-par game.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay bipolar.

Links
more like Poo-ality...heh: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=11752