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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May 2023
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