Recompile

Recompile is a 3D Metroidvania game from the development team Phigames. It is an experience in which you play the role of a program whose mission requires the remediation of a facility’s central system. The game promises exciting confrontations and platform-jumping challenges, in addition to the ability to invade systems to influence the environment. Could she keep her promises?

The Game World and Story

The game world represents the central system of the facility, which suffers from many problems and requires some improvements and reforms demanded of you by the unknown person who brought you into the system. One of the surprising elements in the game is its story told through a series of texts that you can read. These texts inform us about the events that took place in the facility before your arrival and the dialogues that took place between the staff. These dialogues were written to generate curiosity, looking for the next dialogue while presenting drama and funny and surprising situations. Recompile is perhaps one of the best games that has used this approach to telling the story. In an attractive way for the reader.

Graphics and Audio

On the graphical level, the game looks very beautiful with its graphics and the design of its world, which consists of many simple shapes such as squares and triangles that form more complex designs. At the audio level, a group of beautiful melodies is presented, a mixture of piano melodies and electronic melodies that have something of the character of classical melodies.

Gameplay and Challenges

The game system is simple, limited to the movement buttons and one button for aiming and firing, with 3 buttons dedicated to the special abilities you gain throughout the game. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t implement many of its concepts and ideas adequately here, as jumping between platforms is a bit confusing, especially at the beginning of the experience when… you can only jump once and you’ll find that due to the strange design of some platforms repeatedly dropping environments that make you feel like some platforms are stuck together, which isn’t the case. You will enjoy this part after completing the first half of the experience and gaining some of the abilities that we believe should be made available to the player. From the beginning, like double jumps and jumps in the air.

Some environments are designed to keep you constantly jumping from one platform to another without presenting any particular challenge or difference from a previous area. The goal since then has been to extend the lifespan of the experience from our perspective. Here you will feel the monotony of these challenges and the lack of innovation in them. The other confusing thing is the lack of instructions. The game puts you in an open environment. It tells you the destination without any guidance or specifying the points that interest you. I fought with a leader who was impossible to defeat without a certain skill that could have been acquired in a previous area. There is also a certain path without which we find it is impossible to complete the game, and knowing this path goes back to the concept of trial and error, so you realize that Area A is not completed at the moment which means you have to go back and try area B!

Battles and Content

Battles are reasonably entertaining when it comes to fighting enemies, but fighting bosses is disastrous. We are talking about confrontations with a random and chaotic pace against bosses that move at an annoying speed even after gaining the necessary skill to defeat them, thereby killing enthusiasm for these confrontations. It’s also one of the skills we focused on when promoting the game. It is the ability to penetrate systems that, in our opinion, has very limited uses and is not important other than the need to use it in a You can easily forget that you have this ability because it is neither useful nor fun is to use them.

The content in Recompile is limited and the experience is short. Other than facility staff dialogue and some reports, there is nothing to collect or search for other than moving toward the next objective. The experiment took 6 hours to complete, which represents very little value for repeating the experiment. In the end, we found that Recompile succeeded in the aspects that we did not expect it to shine in its narrative, but it failed to execute the various elements of the experience as required. While it’s a reasonably enjoyable experience, it’s riddled with errors and unfortunate decisions.