Game EXP: RiME (NS)

I love this game, plain and simple.  The story was emotional and well written despite the lack of any dialogue throughout the entire game, the character design was simple but beautiful at the same time, and the music which played through the majority of the game was perfect for what this game was trying to accomplish.  There were downsides too though, in the vein of performance issues and the hiding of objects and story elements that ended up going undiscovered.  I should warn anyone interested in playing RiME on any platform, that there will be spoilers of sorts, so be warned.

The game starts out with your unnamed character waking up on the sandy beach of an island after brief visuals of a storm out at sea.  As the game starts, there is no direction.  No note is left to give you any hint at who you are or what you are supposed to be doing.  Through self exploration you discover what each of the buttons on the controller do, or do not do in the case of the shoulder buttons.  What the game does do, is give you obvious landmarks and the sense of adventure took over from there.  As above, there looks to be a tower that looks like you are able to access via a partially broken, but still accessible bridge.  Maybe I will try to go to there.  

This was about the time when I first became aware of the game performance issues that I had heard so much about prior to buying the game back in April.  The game was not as smooth as I was hoping, but was also far from unplayable as a lot of people had made it out to be.  Sure there were times while running along a path towards some white washed building a few hundred yards away that the frame rate dipped down into the low double digits (I cannot say for sure as I do not have a counter for the Switch) and in a handful of instances, the game skipped a couple of frames.  

Now, I bought the game back in April, which was after the patch in February that was supposed to fix a lot of the issues people had with the game, so I can only comment on what was present in version 1.0.2.  For me, the game is far from unplayable.  I never had the game skip on me while trying to jump over a gap on a ledge, or while trying, causing me to fall and lose all of my progress.  The skips and obvious frame rate drops were obviously distracting, but at times it was not so much that I actually felt that I could no longer play.  Glitches on the other hand were a bit different, as in the picture above.  This happened late in the game when I was trying to get to the third windmill, but could not figure out how to get back down to the water.  I do not recall exactly how it happened, but I think I was trying to jump down to some rocks that looked accessible, but I died, then spawned outside of the world, in water, and could not reach anything.  So I restarted from my last checkpoint, which ended up putting me where I wanted to go.  It felt a little bit like cheating since I do not know how I would have gotten there otherwise.  This type of glitch happened only one other time.

As far as story goes, there is a lot going on, but you have to find it first.  There are a lot times that the game allows you to explore areas, partly to look for objects that you might happen to come across, but also because exploring a new place can be a lot of fun.  One of the other issues I had with RiME though was that I discovered, pretty late in the game, how much of the story I had accidentally missed in previous stages because I apparently did not look hard enough.  Scattered throughout the world are pedestal-like objects with a golden keyhole that when peered through, show a painted relief of your life before you are shipwrecked/stranded on the island.  The first keyhole like this I found was well over eight hours into the game, which seems very late to be introduced to something that could only strengthen the emotional impact of the story Tequila Works was telling.  There were also a number of other collectibles that I either failed to find all parts of, or just missed completely.  For instance, there are conches you find that are part of a lullaby, but I did not find one until the second to last act of the game.  In one instance, I knew the location of a collectible, but it was behind a wall that was blocked and I ended up missing out on part of a very powerful (visually and musically) in order to go back and collect it.

And what I said earlier about there being no dialogue, I actually think that this only intesifies the emotional impact of the game.  Similar to Link in The Legend of Zelda games from Ocarina of Time onwards, the character in RiME makes noises when he jumps, laughs, and when he inexplicably is able to intensify the flames in braziers by yelling "Ha!" at them.  The rest of the time, emotion is told through the character reacting to objects around him, and how sometimes those objects react to him.  Even objects, like above, are given some level of humanity by their movements and how the character interacts with them.  In the above screenshot, it is kind of amazing how the sphere is personified by both the boy and the player; or at least it was by me.

And I would be doing RiME a massive disservice if I left out any mention of David García Díaz's score.  There were very few instances where music was not present during the entire game, and when it was present, it definitely felt like it was composed for that specific scene (despite there not being as much music as the amount of time I spent playing), which only amplified the power of the scene.  There were a number of times where I would just look off into the sky, or away towards the horizon as the music played in the background, just taking a moment to take it all in.

In the end, RiME is not a perfect game, or a perfect Switch port (handled by Tantalus and not Tequila Works), and the placement of story related elements seemed to be placed more for the sake of finding something than telling the story.  But I feel that through all of its faults, of which there are not a lot, all of the other positive aspects of the game overshadow the negatives.  And even without the collectibles, Tequila Works has still managed to craft a story and game that left me full of feels and I needed a few minutes to compose myself after the credits finished; Lindsey Sterling's song over the credits was a wonderful addition to David García Díaz's score too.

I guess you could say that I would recommend RiME if you are looking for a game that is not perfect and you are willing to not have buttery smooth 30 fps, but want to experience an amazing journey in a beautifully crafted world with a gorgeous score.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Give Me Something Pretty


P.S.  

Oh yeah, there is a fox too.  Adorable little bastard.