Aww, look at da cute little kitty
Ok so the first thing I noticed about Fragment was that the art style kind of reminds me of a more modern Crazy Cross. The "cutscenes" are given in like a pencil-storyboard format (or at least the first one was). Once I had time to appreciate that I was thrust into the game whereupon two more things grabbed my attention. First, whatever planet you're on must be made of Fun Zone balls or something because your jump can easily catapult you right off the screen. Second, the music is, to quote a wise philosopher, quite bitchin' (oh, that's not a swear. Ger over it).
As I write this, I'm no more than 30 seconds into the actual game, and I can say that I have really high hopes for it. Let me talk about two more things that I noticed right off the bat. First off, the graphical style is not for everybody, but it is certainly for me. I personally love the cartooney, cell-shaded Wind Waker-ey style, but I know a lot of people who don't. Anyway, that's the kind of thing Fragment is going for.
Second, let me talk about that glorious Egoraptorian ideal of perfect conveyance. Fragment starts you off with absolutely no knowledge. All you had was an insubstantial "cutscene" thing. And you know what? That's how I like it! Fragment truly does rely on the game mechanics to teach the player about themselves. Here's an example. Right when you start off, the level is designed in a very linear way. You press "D" and you progress through. It looks like a 2.5D sidescroller at first. Then, I reached a dead end and thought "well what the hell, I'm only 15 seconds in and I already reach a dead end?" But, as it turns out, I was just being an idiot. See, right before I reached the dead end, the world kind of curved a little bit to give the feeling of depth. From this, one may infer that this actually isn't a 2.5D game, but a full-fledged 3D, third-person experience. The game never explicitly told me I had to completely change the paradigm of how I went about playing to progress, but the level design made it easy for me to infer it. This is how you design a game!
and, of course, right as I say that, the ever-infamous information disks are introduced. Whatever, though. In this case I think they're kind of necessary. I would never have figured out that "F" gives me a bird's-eye view of the level I'm at. Oh wait, this game was designed to be used with an Xbox 360 controller, so there's pretty much no excuse...and since I don't have any of those controllers lying around, there are some pretty annoying things I have to deal with.
I want to know who was in charge of mapping the PC controls for this game. Then I want to know if they've ever played a game before. The mouse controls are completely inverted and it feels extremely unnatural, especially when you try to adjust your view while blasting forward and end up probing through your character's nostrils because the mouse controls are a mess!
*pants angrily*
Ok, I think I'm good now. Were it not for the messy control scheme, I'd be really enthused about this game. I love how everything is presented, I love the art style, I love the pacing, I love how the world gradually expands, giving it a tangible sense of enormity. I guess the best way to describe this game is "the result when the best designers out there meet a team of really promising young programmers and one simpleton who thought it was a good idea to completely invert the mouse controls and make playing on a PC an absolute nightmare."
That's all I got for now. If that one guy who's responsible for the shameless act I mentioned happens to read this, sorry for being so harsh, but come on. I can't let something like that slide. Until next time, stay purrrrfect.
Links
Space Meow! https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24674
I like cats, if you couldn't tell...
