890B

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

890B, as far as I can tell, is a character-based Puzzle game released in 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. It puts you in the role of a new hire at a research station searching for inhabitable planets after pollution has caused Earth to become uninhabitable, although your role in this organization seems to be that you have simply been called in to help with some maintenance issues the research station has been having lately.

The presentation here is okay but not great, with 3D characters and simple 3D environments, with some decent lighting and real-time shadows, but with no music or sound beyond a constant low-level hum, your footsteps, and the beeping noise of you clearing messages as they appear.

Players will walk… slowly… though the station’s office/warehouse interior, fetching things for the woman who is currently working there. The game waits a little while before letting you run… slightly less slowly… while continuing to send you on fetch quests, interspersed with bits of poorly-written conversation and internal dialogue.

Then you’ll get to a point where you have to type messages into a computer, prompting the Nintendo Switch to bring up its typing interface. It will process your commands… slowly… and then likely tell you that you need to type another command in first. So you’ll do that… slowly… and it’ll tell you that you need to type another command in. Repeat this process a half a dozen times, sometimes with the game adding in a wait time for the in-game computer to process. No, seriously, they force you to repeat commands that it instructs you to type in, and then it makes you wait for it to actually respond, and that wait was something they deliberately put in the game.

It is one of my greatest irritations in videogames when the game designer makes a deliberate choice to disrespect the player’s time, and this pushed the button for me. But it was about to push another one.

After this… the game froze and refused to continue. I tried restarting the game. No change. So that’s it, that was the entire game, from my perspective – poorly-written dialogue, fetch quests, and a computer typing exercise that wastes player’s time.

Exasperated, I took to YouTube to look up playthroughs of the game, to see if players with a version of the game on other platforms had any better success getting the game to keep playing after the initial 10 minutes. They did, but that doesn’t mean they got a good game.

What happens after this point, from what I can tell, is more of the same stuff I mention above, along with occasional puzzles (mostly Sokoban-style block-pushing puzzles), and with a poor attempt at corporate intrigue toward the end. The entire game can be completed within an hour, with multiple endings if you even care to see the others. I wouldn’t.

If I could, I’d demand a refund for this absolute rip-off, and I only spent $2 on it. This is a broken release of a game that was already tedious, poorly-made, and just all-around terrible. Please do not buy 890B. I suffered through this so you don’t have to, don’t make my sacrifice all for nothing.

tl;dr – 890B is nominally a Puzzle game, but this release crashed 10 minutes into the game and refused to let me past that point. What I got to play was all tedious fetch quests and poorly-written dialogue, followed by even more tedious interactions with a computer that had zero respect for players’ time. Whoever released this terrible game in this horrible state on Nintendo Switch deserves to be shamed for this, and you absolutely should not buy it.

Grade: F

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