Redemption

It's not very often I come across a DigiPen game with a decent plot.  What with the time constraints and limited resources that I assume these students have to work under, most of them don't even try coming up with a plot for their games.  Even the ones that do sort of just establish a setting and leave the rest up to the imagination.

Redemption is sort of a condensed version of everything I think a video game plot should be.  And I mean really condensed.  A quick bit of text at the beginning establishes that a manmade substance called Sample17 has effectively rid the world of humanity and it's up to you, a cleaner robot, to clear out the evil goo and make the world habitable again.  It's kind of like the plot to Wall-e, except...well, you know...good.  In fact, your character actually looks a bit like Eve's brother as he goes through his punk rock phase.

Now, the plot of Redemption took a bold step into the unknown just by existing, which is respectable, but if humanity was wiped out by this Sample17 nonsense, then who is communicating with you and telling you to clean the place up?  The beginning text makes it seem like you're just hearing the recordings of scientists just before they were consumed by their creation, which is emotionally moving enough to get me in the right mood for busting some evil purple gooey heads, but then how do the training rooms make sense?  The same text that sounded completely defeated by this Sample17 is now telling you not only that they were able to isolate a relatively harmless sample of it, but also develop weapons to stop it AND leave those weapons in close proximity to the Sample17. Wouldn't it make more sense to just have the weapons laying around broken down labs for you to find?  After all, if the humans were capable of developing weapons that halt Sample17's growth, how did they manage to get eradicated by it?

These weapons aren't exactly pea shooters, either.  With that excellent segue, I can now talk about the game feel.  It's damn amazing.  The shotgun makes anything in its proximity into a cowering little bitch, and I assume the weapons I'd have unlocked later are even cooler.  The reason I didn't play far enough to find out is because the first non-tutorial level hides the goop spawners so infuriatingly well that I end up just running around aimlessly as the area gets completely covered by death, which I would dare to call the game's biggest flaw, even though the rest of the levels could be perfectly streamlined for all I know.

The game looks nice if you can get past the Minecraft-esque block aesthetic, which is essentially the 3D version of pixel art.  The music and sound effects compliment the setting nicely, and if it weren't for the aforementioned plotholes and design flaw, I would dare to call this game nothing shy of amazingly crafted.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay redeemed:

Links
What do you need to be redeemed for? You're a robot: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26061