Discolored

Genre: First-Person Graphic Adventure / Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Discolored, released on PC and mobile devices in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch and Xbox One in 2021, is a First-Person perspective game that falls somewhere between a Graphic Adventure and a Puzzle game – the sort of puzzles you’ll be solving here very much follow in the Graphic Adventure tradition (combine item X and item Y, use item Z on door, etc.), but the game generally lacks the sort of story you tend to find in a Graphic Adventure. From what you can piece together, it seems like you’re perhaps some sort of secret agent investigating a diner that’s been sapped of its color? Yeah, it’s hard to say exactly for sure what’s going on, because there’s no narrative or dialogue here.

That’s not to say that the presentation is without any sort of personality. Quite the contrary, because what this game lacks in narrative, it generally makes up for with atmosphere, with players wandering around the abandoned diner looking for clues while old-timey music plays over the radio and you hear the buzz of the street light through the window and can watch the moths flutter around it. It may not quite be clear what’s going on here, but there’s certainly a style being evoked here that makes the game’s world an interesting one to explore, and the color-sapped nature of it only adds to its charm.

Players will be doing typical Graphic Adventure stuff, looking for objects to add to inventory and places to use them, but things get interesting when players manage to find colored artifacts. These artifacts, when placed in their proper slot, can return that color back to the world, which in turn can influence puzzles, with some puzzles locked away by the presence of one color, or only visible if another color is present. This makes for some fun puzzles that invite you to explore a different sort of logic, though I’ll say it can be frustrating that the game seems to keep going back and forth between this more bizarre reality-bending logic and more mundane traditional puzzles, as it makes it easier to have trouble discerning just what the game wants you to do.

To help with that, this game does include a built-in hint system that players can resort to if they get stuck, though they’re only given one hint at a time, and if it doesn’t make sense to them or get them to understand what they need to do, they’ll be stuck all the same.

A few other things of note here. Firstly, even though this seems like a game that would work well with the Nintendo Switch touchscreen, that feature hasn’t been implemented here. Also, it bears mention that this game is pretty short, and can be completed in just an hour or two. In fact, given the lack of detail about this game’s world or who your character is, it almost feels like a prologue to something more, but I guess for now this is all we get.

In the end, while I wanted more from Discolored, I was satisfied with what I got. This is a short game that doesn’t do enough to explain its unusual world or its silent protagonist, and a bit more story to bring it closer to a traditional Graphic Adventure would have helped to flesh out that world. Still, there’s some good atmosphere here, and if you’re looking to solve some puzzles for a few hours, this game will make that an enjoyable time for you.

tl;dr – Discolored is a First-Person game with elements of Graphic Adventure and Puzzle games. It’s short, and its interesting world lacks a proper story to explain it and the unusual color-manipulating technology within it, but there’s some good atmosphere here and some clever puzzles. Players looking to solve interesting puzzles for a few hours may want to give this game some consideration.

Grade: C+

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