At night and circulate at full speed on a flying motorbike, accompanied by other two motorists, on what appear to be some high ways. The protagonist whom we play first person pulls out a VinylMan that lets look means its impossible device slot and is placed a pair of headphones that starts the Claro de Luna of Debussy. The relaxing delicacy of the melody puts band sound to a scene of action classic: by between the mist illuminated by them headlights distinguish a block dark in movement. It is a train in motion. We approached by one side and leave the bike running next to the rear balcony of the last wagon. Jump aboard, hack several doors, open hatches, walk on the ceiling and finally steal the loot to return to the bike and escape into our den. Is this introduction dizzying which perhaps gives sense to the pompous title of the game: bandits to horse raiding trains up to midnight; aroma to western and souvenir instant, as if they had forgotten us in these two years, the mastery of Blendo Games to tell complex stories full of references and excitement in just three words. Or two, in this case: Quadrilateral Cowboy.
Brendon Chung, the soul and the body of the study, is a creatively extravagant type, one of those minds willing to kill conventions and practice a thorough autopsy, and not undergo never established. With titles as Gravity Bone or Thirty Flights of Loving has become one of the fathers of the postmodern videogame, a craftsman of recognizable style – these characters cubic, or as he calls them, quadrilaterals are something like a House brand, an author resource, and a declaration of intent: I prefer to spend my time in the important truth- and completely obsessed with the structure of the narrative of the game which this time has decided to make a Award: accompany your story with puzzles.
Waiting brought with him some concern: what can we expect from a guy whose best works dispense completely with the intervention of the player? Their proposals were a marvel of synthesis on the art tell stories and planting emotions in the heart of a player who was actually more spectator. Them doubts is dissipate very quickly: Quadrilateral Cowboy is dota to itself same of a mechanical infallible in it respective to issues visceral- or, said of another mode: its puzzle are very satisfactory, very given to massage the muscle of the Epiphany and to make us feel all it decisive that not are in the life-, but nor check hand of a complexity excessive. The problems that propose us to solve based their fun in the very process of solving them.
Here is where comes into play retro machinery used by the protagonist as a working tool: computers in late 1980s, nascent and rudimentary versions of outdated virtual reality which never existed, primitive gadgets and appliances taken from a cyberpunk with aroma to camphor, industrial espionage and theft of white glove service. Them pots that form our arsenal, as a small drone with legs or a rifle of precision by control remote, is handled from the deck -term of the slang hacker annexed to refer is to the computer that the Oxford Dictionary translates with a Word so chilling as «cassette»-based commands written inspired remotely in the language of programming Lua-door2.open (3) to open a door during three seconds for example – and computer concepts that all us sound even from afar as the “dir” to list content or telnet to connect to the terminals of the stage. Quadrilateral Cowboy not looking for any type of documentary rigor, and more than one Prim coder will give you headache incoherent Potpourri of programmatic verbiage, but it is something entirely deliberate: the game search accessibility above all as a tool to achieve his own virtue. It is a kind of fascination in tinkering with the pottery shop, typing code and work; something related to the pleasure ancestral press intro a keyboard mechanical, loud and yellowish, and that can only be described with a universal and primal expression: the gustico.Narrative side, Brendon Chung game no moves or a millimeter of the usual brilliance of its author in the field. The setting, a sort of dystopia retrofuturistic aires gibsonianos – are part of a small independent company formed by three women and so-called Impala Solutions dedicated to corporate theft and theft of valuable data to third parties-, merges with the history to base explain nuances and small stories without using dialogues or texts, supported by an environment that is itself an open book. The interludes between missions are the most illustrative and interesting experience in this sense: when we go to pick up our colleagues of wrongdoing to his home, for example, we can explore your home while we wait in the back seat of the flying motorcycle and understand why engage in a criminal career. The depressing live crowded together in small rooms without windows, literary tastes, the awards granted in industrial design competitions or the photos hanging on the wall or experimental narrative video games (and playable) developed in the spare time are itself emergent microfiction, that stand as parts of a poignant tale chopped about friendship, working in a ultracapitalista and exploitative jungle survival , and the beauty of the things created through collaboration. Quadrilateral Cowboy is a puzzle game where the story formula itself, in a sense, as another puzzle.
If something is you can blame to the game is perhaps its structure something confusing, mostly in the last stretch. The presentation of each new gadget and its functioning include a learning process interesting and satisfactory, but progression is not cumulative, and there are techniques that we never return to use or to combine with other newly acquired. The end is round in the narrative, but very steep in the mechanical; puzzle games veteran will feel some empty frustrating, as if a Quadrilateral Cowboy are missing a last act, a Hurrah where to test everything I learned.
It is possible that Brendon Chung has raised his game as a kind of practical guide where to present their occurrences and demonstrate the fun of their possibilities, convince us of how beautiful and how fast that is the bike to sell it through its ease for the mod, which is very visible in the options menu. Or perhaps it’s another of those neuro’s author endeavored to break with the usual Protocol of the genre, make a game that deliberately not maneuver in the same ways as the rest, a conscious and critical deconstruction of ABC chiseled in stone and followed feet deep by those who came before. Or can you not; that is a bad design decision, a perfectly human calculation and amnistiable error, but a failure in the end and after. And it is that with geniuses like Chung, blessed are all, you never know. [9]
