Phoning Home is a game with long stretches that seem absolutely determined to make me want to put it down and never return to it again. And that’s a real shame, because there are moments when its rigidly linear attack on the crafting/survival genre promises to make headway. After crash landing on a strange alien planet, you’re forced to scavenge for resources that might allow you to send a distress call back to your home world and arrange a rescue. Only, the planet keeps throwing up little surprises: resources that shouldn’t really exist in a natural habitat; lifeforms that make very little sense; signs of a previous civilisation that seems to have evaporated.
One of the game’s clever twists is that rather than having you try to survive your new conditions as a fleshy human, it places you in control of a sentient explorer droid named ION. Through little snippets of conversation you have with the inboard intelligence system of the craft in which you crashed, you slowly learn more about the pair and why they were exploring in the first place. They need the resources, it seems. Both come from a world that has long abandoned biological bodies. Standard life forms have transferred their minds into all manner of practical robots like ION, which are employed to search for new resource-rich planets to strip mine. ION doesn’t need to worry about going hungry or finding shelter, and early discoveries are thus tinted with an emotional distance. Mainly because ION is one of those silent protagonists (for good reason for a change; vocal hardware was damaged during the crash), all communication is either wordless or handled by a third party. To begin with, the ship is the only source of dialogue. Its helpful tidbits include encouraging updates to how the duo's chance of survival has risen to 5.6%, or warnings to be careful while harvesting seeds, which are viewed as dirty biological bombs that might contain something as unwholesome as an entire tree.
Eventually, you come across another ship, which contains a second inboard intelligence system with views that contradict those of your own craft, causing the pair to clash on subjects like the value of preserving life, or whether or not gender should be assigned to sentient robots. The second ship has its own droid, which went missing some time ago. Your new mission is to go hunt her down. You eventually find her, after a few memorable encounters with some of the stranger creatures on the planet, and after making some discoveries that include a massive tree with leaves made out of light. It seems the game’s about to open up and really hit its stride. Then you rescue ANI, and the remainder of Phoning Home becomes one long escort mission. Because people bloody adore escort missions...
Staff review by Gary Hartley (February 21, 2017)
Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you. |
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