Framed Collection

Genre: Graphic Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Framed Collection is two games (Framed and Framed 2), both puzzle games where you’re essentially piecing together your own comic by rearranging the panels, with the goal of making sure the story is arranged in such a way that your heroes survive and escape their predicament intact.

Say, for example, there are two panels, one with a stairway leading to a roof, and one with an armed police officer lying in wait on the roof. If the stairway is the first panel, your hero will climb up to the roof only to encounter the officer, but if you swap the two, your hero will manage to sneak behind the ambush.

It’s a clever concept, and one that the game manages to shake up by letting players do different things with panels depending on the puzzle, such as spinning certain panels or re-using some of them, and actually thinking of the timeline and direction everyone is facing is a fairly unique approach to the puzzle genre.

The game’s presentation is slick too, with characters rendered as silhouettes against simplistic scenery, and old-fashioned spy/sleuth music playing that perfectly sets the tone for this game’s theme of cunning rogues on the run from the law, and from each other.

There is a bit of a problem though, and it comes to the puzzles themselves, which seem to come in one of two forms. Either it’s simply a matter of “make the hero run through a gauntlet making sure everyone is positioned in the right places for him/her”, which gets repetitive very fast, or it’s “re-order this sequence of events”, which can at times make it unclear exactly what the game wants you to do. This pairing results in the game going between tedious and outright frustrating at times.

The result is a game with an amazing concept and a fantastic presentation that is nevertheless frequently lacking in fun, which is a damn shame – the style and originality present in Framed Collection had so much potential, if the game’s creators found better ways to harness it.

tl;dr – Framed Collection is a pair of puzzle games where you’re moving around frames of a comic to make sure the hero survives the story. It’s a great concept with an amazing presentation, but the gameplay makes it frequently frustrating and tedious.

Grade: C+

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