A Story About My Uncle

Amazing game. The worst part of this game is the fact it doesn't have a sequel, because everything else is incredibly assembled into this masterpiece of a game! Art Direction is awesome, the story is perfect, everything about it just makes me want to know more the universe around this game... 10/10

ASAMU is a short narrative-driven first person platformer. It is mostly framed as a bedtime story between a father and his daughter about an interdimensional(?) search for his uncle in a land of frog people; there's a nice layer of unreliable narration due to this premise and is further muddied by the epilogue where evidence of Fred's supposed technology is no longer visible (wiped blackboard/snow-covered transporter). The resolution of the hunt for Fred is a little dissatisfying as Fred has no real interest in being found, yet built you a suit to find him, and had built in a one-way transport home in a random cave. At best, for me, this again skews that the story is probably not intended to be entirely believed at face value. In terms of gameplay its pretty unique. First person platforming is generally tacked on as an afterthought in FPS and so its nowhere near as well-designed as it is here. The 'grappling hook' is more akin to a tractor beam and couples really well with the rocket boots you later find. The game can be challenging at points but there's only really a couple of times that it spikes unreasonably. The game also handles signposting in a cool diagetic way; when you use your beam it leaves a mark and you follow the same marks to progress, implying that you are following in Fred's footsteps. I would say that the way your control is largely inhibited during cutscenes is very frustrating; you can still wander around, slowly, so it doesn't even achieve forcing you to watch the conversation play out, nor is there really any need to as, visually, there is no meaningful portrayal of emotions through animations. In short, I wanted to keep playing around while they talked and there wasn't a good reason to deny me. But that's really about the only negative criticism I had of this otherwise very well-designed game.