Sorry, James

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Sorry, James is a Puzzle game with some strong story elements. Players take the role of James Garner, a security guard at a tech company who has been enlisted to help decrypt some files you’ll soon discover to be a lurid conversation between a man and a woman.

Much of this isn’t told to you in the game itself, and had to be gleaned from the game’s page on Nintendo.com. Even more frustratingly, the game starts you off on a login screen with a list of usernames and a list of passwords and expects them to piece together how to login before the game proper even begins. I’ll save you some trouble – it’s username JAMES_GARNER and password zEiaQe@z1l3, which you’re apparently supposed to learn by looking at the game’s profile on the eShop.

I swear, this game hadn’t even started yet, and already I’m sick of its BS.

“Decrypting” the game’s files involves solving puzzles that have you connecting squares on a grid. I’ll be honest, I didn’t quite understand the logic of these puzzles, and it’s never really explained to the player. Why do these squares connect, but those squares don’t? As far as I could tell, the mechanics of these puzzles seemed arbitrary.

What’s worse, this game has quite possibly the most terrible controls I’ve encountered for any game on the Switch, which is bizarre since all you’re doing is selecting highlighted areas on the screen and navigating menus. Yet my button inputs didn’t seem to register two-thirds the time, making the simple act of selecting things from a menu into a needless chore.

The visuals here are absolutely nothing noteworthy, emulating an 80s-era PC interface with monochrome visuals with very little personality beyond a little faux screen distortion and thumbnail photos of those involved in the conversation. Don’t expect anything interesting in the sound department either – you just get some simulated old computer noises.

The tragic part is, the parts of the game’s story I was able to uncover are actually pretty good, albeit somewhat anachronistic in that it seems like a very modern conversation to be on such antiquated in-game computer technology. It’s fascinating to look over snippets of intimate conversations between these characters, and wonder why I’ve been assigned this task in the first place. The conversation jumps from very graphic sexual talk to emotional and introspective thoughts on life and relationships in a very natural way, and I would have loved to see more of this. Unfortunately, the damn game kept getting in the way.

That’s really what it comes down to in the end – as a story, Sorry, James is fascinating and compelling, but as a game, this is one of the worst experiences I’ve had on the Nintendo Switch. You know a game has gone terribly, terribly wrong when players need to consult a walkthrough to figure out how to even start the damn thing, and this is only followed up with arbitrary puzzles and some of the worst controls I’ve ever experienced in a videogame. As it is, Sorry, James is broken beyond playability, and I would not recommend anyone to bother with it.

tl;dr – Sorry, James is a Puzzle game that has players solving puzzles to decrypt a lurid conversation. The story is compelling, but the gameplay is so ill-conceived and outright broken that I would not recommend anyone to force themselves to struggle through it. Do not get this game.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2020 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Game

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