Relicta

Genre: First-Person Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Relicta is a First-Person Puzzle game released in 2020 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game takes place in a research facility on a terraformed moon, where players take the role of a research scientist who must work her way through the facility after it begins to suffer some unknown malady.

The story here is interesting, with some fascinating lore involving a past extraterrestrial war whose ramifications are still affecting current-day politics, but unfortunately much of this is undone by that old problem of ludonarrative dissonance. See, your character’s job involves testing out specialized high-tech equipment that can manipulate cubes’ gravity and magnetic charge, and once everything starts to fall apart, you must work your way through the facility by… going through all of the puzzle chambers, which the computer’s AI refuses to allow you to bypass, despite the emergency situation. This latter part seems tacked on as an excuse to force the story to still make sense even though you’re stopping to solve cube and button-pressing puzzles while everyone is in severe danger. Seriously, does every AI share GlaDOS’s fixation on scientific tests?

Beyond the questionable marriage of gameplay and story, the rest of the presentation here is good, with nice 3D visuals with a fair amount of detail and some decent water and reflection effects, good voice acting for the characters, and a cinematic-style soundtrack that works well for the game.

When it comes to the gameplay, the core premise works well to give this game a unique core identity when compared to the likes of games like Portal and The Talos Principle. Puzzles all revolve around trying to figure out how to do things by messing with gravity, magnetic charges, and security gates that only work if assigned buttons are held down (either by a block or yourself), along with teleporters that can assign their properties to the blocks to summon said blocks. The game has some good ideas for ways to use these mechanics, though I do think it can occasionally get repetitive.

Unfortunately, Relicta is a little lacking in the polish department, with cubes often getting stuck on the environment in ways that clearly weren’t intended, and level design that makes it possible to irreparably mess everything up. To the game’s credit, it does have a button to reset the game’s levels, but it’s kinda’ sad it even needed one – Portal never had a need for such a feature, after all.

Despite its flaws, Relicta is still a fun First-Person Puzzle game with an interesting story and some unique signature central mechanics to tie everything together. I wish this game spent a bit longer in the design phase to find better solutions for its level design and ludonarrative dissonance issues, and also a bit longer in testing to work out issues with things getting stuck, but overall I think fans of the genre will like this one.

tl;dr – Relicta is a First-Person Puzzle game that has players in the role of a researcher on a terraformed moon trying to work their way to resolve the worsening situation in their facility by… solving gravity and magnetism block and button puzzles. There’s definitely some disconnect between the gameplay and story, and the gameplay also has some design issues and could have used a bit more polish, but overall I think this is a game that genre fans will enjoy.

Grade: B-

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