When Steam Greenlight first started I ran across The Girl and the Robot, thought it looked like an interesting game, and voted for it. Months later I navigated through Kickstarter for some reason and saw they had a Kickstarter, and while I didn’t back it, because I don’t back anything, I remember hoping it’d work out. Then as time passed I forgot about it, and I wasn’t the only one. Forums for this game are littered with “is this game dead?” topics. But it wasn’t dead! And after four years, we finally have a 1.0.
The Girl and the Robot starts with a cage suspended in the air containing a single little girl. A wounded bird arrives at the cage, and the girl nurses it back to health. As a reward a mysterious old man decides to pull a lever and set the girl free. The girl now finds herself free to wander the labyrinthine prison patrolled by sword wielding robots dressed in medieval armor. Eventually she finds an amulet, which gives her control (or makes her friends) with a robot who is also being held prisoner. And so, they team up to escape their imprisonment.
This is a game that wears its inspirations on their sleeve. Fans of Team Ico games will feel immediately at home, and so you get close to your characters by virtue of living through their trials and tribulations, and by the nature of their dependency of one another. Like Team Ico’s titles plot specifics can feel scarce. Why was the girl imprisoned? who is the old man? what about the robot? Don’t expect much by way of concrete answers.
The way that The Girl and Robot plays is by alternating between the two main characters to solve puzzles. The girl is small, so she can get into many nooks and crannies, and agile, so she can jump over gaps. The robot, on the other hand can move big objects, and more importantly, it can fight the other robots that guard their prison. At first I assumed I had no reason to send the robot first everywhere, but the game teaches you very quickly that separating them is a bad idea. The girl is vulnerable while you are trying to control the robot, and the game will have enemies attack her while you are doing something else with the robot. The girl is also able to heal the robot, and so being far away from the girl means the robot becomes more and more vulnerable the further away it gets. So you learn to keep them together, and having to keep them apart becomes a source of tension. This works well to develop their relationship in an organic way. The game also cheekily uses this against you to great effect, waiting for you to get used to this idea, then forcing you to extended sections where both characters are separated to really turn up the tension.
At its core, The Girl and the Robot is a narrative puzzle game. It really has two different types of gameplay: the puzzle solving, and combat. The puzzle solving is great, the combat not so much. But lets start with the positive, this game has great puzzles, most of which depend on you coordinating between the two characters to solve them. It starts off simply enough, but as soon as you get comfortable with the game, it will start adding new mechanics. There is actually a surprising amount of variety to all the puzzles of the game. They are also paced masterfully, usually featuring a simple introductory puzzle to make sure you understand the new mechanic, before presenting several iterations that escalate in complexity before moving on to the next mechanic. This keeps the gamplay feeling fresh while at the same making sure the new mechanics do not wear out their welcome. These puzzles manage to incorporate combat in very interesting ways, so even when you think that you have mastered a new mechanic, you can still be suddenly put into a situation you were not expecting.
The level design complements the puzzles well, and there is quite a bit of variety to environments in the game, all which feel greatly planned out. It is a bit like a Metroidvania at times, with new paths opening up to familiar areas that were thread before, though with changes that allow for progress. A lot of the story telling is environmental, being told by interacting through some of the objects in the game world, which means there are rewards for paying attention to your surroundings. You are also able to see areas you have visited or will visit if you take the time to look for them, which goes a long way to make the interconnected world seem more real, even with the clearly low production values that have gone into this game.
This lack of polish and production values are the single biggest factor working against an otherwise really well put together title. The biggest victim of this is the combat which feels slow and clunky, with very little depth. There are essentially three moves the robot can perform: a sword slash, a block, and a ranged attack with a bow. The slash attacks only have the one three swing combo, and there is really no movement whatsoever. The typical engagement consists of putting your shield up until the enemy attacks, before countering with a three hit combo. The combat system gets less and less viable as you meet more enemies, and there seems to be a hard cap to the number of enemies you can fight at once. Two? no issue. Three? Sure. Four? you will lose every time. This is because with more than three enemies you won’t have an opening to attack, and since enemies stun you for a short period of time when you take damage, you will be stun locked until you die. It makes combat a chore, but not one that is likely to prevent your progress.
The lack of polish extends to the environments as well. They are very well designed, and there is a surprising variety in them. While they look gorgeous in still, while in motion there is this occasional haze that seems to cover everything. It reminds me of the low draw distance environments you will see in sixth generation games. These environments are also largely empty. Sure there are occasional bits of environmental story telling, but it has to be found and most of the levels are empty and lifeless. There are no NPCs other than those crucial to the story, and of course, the robots that are trying to kill our heroes in every turn. The music is largely forgettable, it is not bad, and it suits the game fine for whatever is going on. But you will never find yourself humming it, and you likely won’t seek the OST out on YouTube when you have to do something else and need background music to focus. There are some cutscenes and they do a good job of conveying what they intend to, but they have this one brief frame skip every time they change angle, which can be very distracting. The animations could also have used to some work, as they look stiff and floaty, particularly the times when the girl has to jump.
Despite all this, The Girl and the Robot managed to pull me in with its atmosphere. The development team has chosen where to focus its scarce resources well. The villain is very well put together, and for the low quality most animations, expressions on the character’s faces have been clearly been given extra attentions. And if these details drew me in, its rock solid game play kept me interested enough to finish its story, if only to find a surprisingly high quality and compelling ending sequence.
And in a way that is how I would describe The Girl and the Robot, as a game that surprises and delights despite its rough edges and clear need for a higher budget. The puzzles are deeper than I was expecting. There are more mechanics for the puzzles that manage to keep it feeling fresh, coupled with a development team wise enough to retire these mechanics before they got stale. And I was certainly surprised by how much the story held my interest, vague as it is. The game is about four hours long, but at a $10 price tag, I feel that it is more than a fair enough price. If you like narrative puzzle games in the style of the offerings of team Ico, and you don’t mind the low production costs that clearly come with this game, I’d say go ahead and pick this one up!
This review was performed on pre-release code provided by the publisher.
