Return to Grace

 

 

Genre: Adventure    

Developer & Publisher: Creative Bytes Studios              

Released: May 30, 2023              

Requirements: OS, 64-bit Windows 10

Processor: Minimum, Intel Core i5; Recommended, Intel Core i7

Memory:  Minimum 4 GB RAM; Recommended, 8 GB RAM

Graphics:  Minimum GeForce GTX 960; Recommended, GeForce GTX 1060

DirectX:  Version 11

Storage:  6 GB available space

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By flotsam

 

Return to Grace

Creative Bytes

This is two and half hours of gentle straightforward sci-fi adventuring.

You play as space archaeologist Adie Ito, who has unearthed the ancient resting place of Grace, an A.I. god and onetime caretaker of the solar system. Adie is here to explore, but primarily to uncover why Grace was shutdown thousands of years ago. Upon accessing the spire, fractured variations of Grace, each with their own personalities and motives, help and (perhaps) hinder her endeavours.

A monitor on your left wrist will be your major piece of equipment. Use  it to hack a range of items, navigate around various environments, and engage with the different A.I. persona. The latter happens automatically – you don’t choose to converse – but a little digital facetime will be involved.

While none of them are Glados, the A.I.s are an interestingly eclectic bunch. Empathy, Logic and Control, they each have their own personality consistent with their ‘type,’ which get combined to create new ones across the course of the game. Plus they talk a lot. Throw in Allen, the A.I. that is Adie’s spaceship, and it’s a chatty world indeed.

The game plays in the first person and utilises the wasd keys and the mouse. Movement through the environment is exclusively with the keyboard, but interacting with that environment uses both the mouse and the keyboard. You might have to pull on a lever, which will likely be done using the ‘s’ key, or use a ratchet which might have you alternating back and forth with the ‘a’ and ‘d’ keys. Find the things to examine with the mouse, and the mouse might then be used to activate the item or a puzzle, or to jump from here to there, or to start climbing a ladder. You will know what to use each time as the relevant keys will appear at the bottom right of screen.

There is no inventory, and you don’t gather items, so no need to worry about that aspect. The puzzles are very simple, and even a (comparatively) more complicated version of a pattern recognition puzzle comes with an A.I. solve option. I was also apparently taking too long to peck out the Roman Numeral for 10 on one occasion, and so one of the A.I.s told me what I needed to do.

As they will with what to do next – “you need to gain access to the transit system which is back through the control room,” “look for a lever in the grate in front of one of the doors” – that sort of thing. Your current objective will also pop up top left, as it will again to show you it has been completed. To my recollection there was never more than one at a time.

Which makes it a very easy game, not quite painting by numbers but almost. Balancing on a beam and throwing rocks at some levers offer a modicum of challenge, but nothing that will delay you for very long. If you want a puzzling effort, you won’t find it here.

Which doesn’t make it unenjoyable, just easy.

The story as to what happened to Grace unfolds as you progress, through the information and insights provided by the A.I'.s, graffiti which can be found daubing the walls as you move deeper into the Spire, and audio canisters which you can hack. I thought it was well told, an aspect that was helped by the voice acting of the various characters, Adie in particular. There are some big themes, as there should be when investigating a caretaker god, and there are some choices you make at various points as well, which I assume impact how the events then play out but I don’t actually know. Perhaps you end up in the same place anyway, which for me was a point of reflection for Adie when all became clear.

Visually and aurally it was more than satisfactory, and while I always turn the music down low I was taken with some choral pieces that played. That I noticed says a lot.

Unless I missed something, the game saves automatically in a single slot (although you can have 4 games on the go at one time), which didn’t matter other than to mean I couldn’t go back and see what a different choice might have done. I can of course play again, which I might do, but not straight away. Something more complicated beckons.

I played on:

OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit

Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz

RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB

Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB

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