Space Tail: Every Journey Leads Home

I will preface this by saying that if you are already somewhat interested in this game, and it's on offer, then for how little it costs, I can easily recommend picking it up. There’s enough content in the game that will be worth the price of admission, and there’s even a demo; again, if you played it and it’s got you interested, you will find it worth the price.   As for the game itself, I think it's rather quite good. There’s quite a lot this game does right as an indie title, though there are also some issues and problems that are present. Note: this review will be as spoiler-free as possible.   The gameplay is a story-driven platformer with elements of stealth, action and a little bit of puzzling. You control a dog called Bea who starts off living on Earth before being separated from their adoptive owner. They then end up embarking (pun intended) on a quest to reunite themselves while exploring the depths of space. In terms of the gameplay, it is a classic 2.5D platformer and all the staples are accounted for and familiar. You have three innate “senses” which you can use to aid you: hearing, which allows you to visually see sounds; smell, which allows you to see which gases are poisonous and what scent you have for some puzzles; and sight, which allows you to see connections between things like buttons and doors. The game makes good use of these, and they are very useful if you want to find additional collectables and hidden lore. Another notable mechanic is the ability to communicate with the various inhabitants that you come across in the story. I find this mechanic just “ok”. It’s not anything particularly special, and the only punishment for messing it up is having to wait or dodge away while the creature returns to their neutral state. My main issue is there is no depth to it; simply choose a starting action, see how they react and go from there. Where the problem lies is that if you pair each action with their counterpart on the opposite side of the radial menu, they cancel each other out. This means you cannot ever lose any encounter – simply choose an action, if it didn’t move the creature to a happy state, simply perform the opposite action and try another action.   The story is perhaps the next big piece and very much drives the gameplay. I will not spoil anything here, but I found the story to be, in contrast to the communication system, much more fleshed out and with quite a bit of depth to it. There are loads of characters, artefacts and lots of general information that does a fantastic job at describing the fictional universe. While traversing levels, you can find areas, which you can scan to get lore fragments. These can be read in the menu and, to my surprise, have a decent amount of information in each of them. These are actually quite fun to read, and it really does complement the story – aside from one bit, which I’ll get to later. A couple of minor issues I do have is that it firstly can be described in a single word: “contrived”. To me, it feel like the next stage in the game was heavily forced by the cutscene that preceded it. The issue is, after you finish the stages on a planet, it feels like you could just go straight to the end of the game from a narrative point of view. The cutscenes’ remedy to this is by having a significant amount happen in about 4 panels of narrated images. The whole set of stages on a planet could take an hour where, typically, you have one or two goals that progress the story. Then, the cutscene happens and loads of things happen, and you’re now on a new planet. It could just be me, but the story felt a little disjointed – more like every planet had its own story written in isolation, and then the overarching story tried to link them together.   The final bit of the game requires you to make two choices; both affect the story, and one of them affects the final gameplay. A small thing with this is one of the choices makes absolutely no sense in my opinion. One of the choices is between destroying two entities, or combining them. Throughout the whole game, each of these entities has been described, documented and shown to be chaotic and evil – which makes the choice of unifying or destroying them seem a non-choice; clearly the latter is what should be done. Strangely, if you download and complete the two DLC levels, you will be given two cutscenes which explains these entities, how they were created and what they stand for, which makes this choice actually a meaningful choice. If these pieces of information were present to the player before the decision, then this would seem like a simple fix.   As for the soundtrack, I’m someone who enjoys game soundtracks and plays them more than regular songs. I’m happy to say this one is quite a nice addition to my collection. It’s more focused around ambient/atmospheric pieces, and it does the job very well. Soundtracks are always the most subjective, but for me this was a decent OST.   The art style is also nothing short of fantastic. It’s very well constructed in my opinion and there are a number of places in the game that look amazing, despite not having an advanced lighting system in the game engine or anything like that. This extends to the cutscenes as well which, while they are basically just still images with a little bit of animation, again the art style really shines.   So far, my review has been based on my casual playthrough. At this point, I would say this is a good game, close to being great even. Unfortunately, where this game is at its worst is when going for completion.   I wanted to go back and collect all the lore fragments, and find all the hidden skins you can get for Bea...at which point I found some infuriating bugs. While I did encounter some bugs on my initial playthrough, they weren’t frequent – the same cannot be said when going for completion. There are lots of minor bugs: Bea freaking out when on the edge of ledges; some abilities and senses not activating; the gravity of objects getting very confused when you jump; all fine examples. Where the game became infuriating was the collision detection...or lack thereof. For some reason, collisions will just refuse to detect anything sometimes. I will sit on collectables and they won’t be collected, buttons won’t be pressed, etc. It is much more prevalent because the game seems to recalculate collisions whenever you die – which you will do a lot of when trying to find collectables. When I load into a level, the collision can be fine but then I die and can no longer hit a button I could previously. You can die again to hopefully fix it...except that can sometimes mean losing a huge amount of progress for levels that have few checkpoints. And when I say collision detection, while I’ve yet to fall through the floor, the triggers that take you to the next stage can also fail to register – the closest I got to quitting the game out of frustration was a little over halfway into the story where I died jumping into a pit. I naturally assumed that it meant it was a bottomless pit I should avoid. I then spent at least 20 minutes trying to find a way to progress because the only thing that I could do was move left...but be blocked by a box that I could never jump high enough over, or jump to the right...which was blocked by electric gates. There was literally nothing else I could think of and so after racking my brains I decided to try the pit again and...it loaded the next stage. Extremely frustrating.   The only good thing I can say about completion is that the achievements do not seem to be adjusted for the DLC levels, meaning you actually only need 29/31 lore fragments and 18/20 skins to get them.   I do want to end this by saying I did overall enjoy my time playing it, and I definitely got more than my money's worth from it. As this is the first game by this indie studio, I cannot expect it to be flawless and I will say, even with the bugs, this is a good attempt at a first game.