Promesa

Genre: Walking Simulator

Players: 1

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Review:

Promesa is a Walking Simulator released on PC in 2020 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game intersperses various almost diorama-like setpieces with text snippets of conversations where a grandfather speaks about his life experiences and regrets.

The graphics here are an odd combination of extraordinarily good and extremely, extremely bad. Locales are depicted with some extremely good detail and superb lighting that makes them seem real… if you squint. The problem is, the moment you look closely, the illusion breaks, as the textures are extremely low resolution in a “looks like a PlayStation One game” sorta’ way. Unfortunately, the illusion is shattered further by this game’s atrociously poor performance on Nintendo Switch, with the framerates dropping tremendously, despite the low fidelity of the visuals.

If there’s one element of this game that’s unambiguously great, it’s the sound, which does a truly great job of helping to set the scene in every location you walk through, with excellent subtle environmental noises.

As for the gameplay, this is a topic that is clearly very personal and very very meaningful… but only to the game’s creator. Without the proper context for the locations and objects players are observing, it’s all rather meaningless. And while individual scenes are occasionally creative, that only goes far enough to elicit a very brief “huh, that’s kinda’ neat”, before moving on.

You walk through one location… extremely… painfully… slowly (you can increase the walk speed settings, but even at the fastest speed this game moves like molasses) until the game decides you’ve seen enough and fades to black, maybe shares a snippet of translated text conversation, and then fades in on another location… or perhaps the same location at a different time.

There’s no narrative here, no explanation for what you’re seeing or why, no sense of an idea being built from scene to scene. Even the conversational snippets could have been rearranged in any order and their meaning in the overall piece wouldn’t really change the experience for most players. And for most players, that experience will be pure, unadulterated boredom. I suppose the player should be grateful that this tedious experience only lasts for roughly 45 minutes or so.

If you’re a fan of Walking Simulators, you’re already a niche part of the market who is willing to go out on a limb to experience something a little different. Even so, I strain to think that you’ll appreciate Promesa – its topic matter is very personal and the game has no interest in making us understand that perspective, and even the elements of beauty it contains are ruined by the poor performance and the tedium of the game’s slow walking speeds.

tl;dr – Promesa is a Walking Simulator that has players moving very very very slowly through diorama-like setpieces interspersed with snippets of text conversations. This was clearly a very personal story for the game’s creator, but the player isn’t really given enough context to appreciate that story, and while there are elements of beauty in the game’s presentation (especially the excellent sound design), that beauty is demolished by poor performance on Nintendo Switch and the extremely tedious gameplay.

Grade: D

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Sound Design

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