Game EXP: Missing Features: 2D (NS)

Missing Features 2D

Systems Released: PC, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: December 18, 2020

Publisher: QUByte Interactive

Developer: High Level

Play Time: 5-10 Hours

I really enjoyed playing Missing Features: 2D and I love the concept.  If you are familiar with Evoland then it was kind of like that but in a 2D platforming world rather than in the RPG/JRPG genre.  I would say that the first five or six levels were just straight up fun with a great mix of difficulty and the concept of putting together a game as you play through each of the stages.  These early levels are what exactly what I was hoping the game would be.  The next three levels really presented more of a challenge, which is not to say that they were not fun, but the difficulty factor was encroaching on the fun factor.  The last two levels I completed were an un-fun slog and I stopped playing during the twelfth level.

The concept behind Missing Features: 2D is that you are playing a game that is missing features.  Your character avatar is missing so you are an empty green box.  The landscape is missing so it is just a featureless black plain.  There is no music, there are no sound effects.  Essentially, you are playing Pong the platformer.  But without sound.  As you progress through each stage, you pick up computers which add features to the game and the visual loading process is what adds a lot of the charm to the game.  When you collect a computer, you do not know what feature you are going to be loading permanently into the game, although typically the computer unlocks a feature that will directly allow you to progress through the rest of the stage, be it the double-jump or dash ability.

Each stage is made up of stereotypical platforming elements.  Platforms, spikes, enemies, projectiles.  But not all of those elements start out implemented.  Even the background and the stage's music are non-existent when you start each stage.  And like a lot of well designed platformers, you are not expected to be able to perform all the abilities you have at the end of the game and gain the necessary skills to pull off complex maneuvers.

When you start out the game, you are a a filled-in box and eventually you become an unanimated character sprite with a blocked outline, which is essentially your hitbox, the specific area that is affected when you run into an environmental hazard or an enemy hits you.  As strange it is to have a non-moving avatar is for your character, I found it to be the most useful and practical, especially in a platforming game.  Knowing where your character's hit box starts and stops is significantly more important than having a sprite that looks amazing, especially if your character's animation is going to have their foot elevated mid-jump, but that they can still be hit where their foot is not.  The same goes for environmental hazards.  When you have a triangular spike but the hitbox for the spike is a rectangle, that presents a visual problem when making jumps over and around spikes.

In Level 10, I was able to capture enough screenshots showing my character dying without visually hitting anything, which is infuriating when you are expected to land on a small lip of a ledge before jumping across a gap while dashing mid-air over another row of spikes.  In another section (in the clip below, and ignoring the first spikes I het because I did not press the dash button at the absolute apex of my double jump), there were ceiling spikes that would hit your without physically coming into contact with you, being another problem with the hit boxes.  This made various areas of level 10 and absolute slog to play through because I felt that I was no longer trying to improve the way I played, but just make it through section by sheer luck, which in my opinion is no way to design a game.  Another issue I had with Level 10 was how late in the level you gained the music.  For a level this difficult, I feel like you would want to have the player gain the music early on to at least keep them interested, assuming that the music is good, and for the most part, the music was pretty good.

My biggest critique with Missing Features: 2D is the difficulty curve.  For the majority of the game, the levels felt fun and I would look forward to the new feature that I would unlock and how that would improve and modify the existing gameplay.  By the ninth stage, once levels started feeling like they were going to take a fair amount of playing to get the new mechanics and recently integrated features down, specifically the mid-air dash, I began to dread starting the game up.  By the 10th level, I genuinely felt that I hated the game, in part due to its difficulty, but also because of the lack of user-friendly options for the type of game that this felt like it was trying to be.  

On top of all of this was how the checkpoint system was implemented.  Sure, you could argue that the existence of checkpoints implies that they make the game easier because you no longer have to start back at the beginning forcing you to be better at the game, but in this game when the difficulty ramps up to the point that getting passed jumps/enemy placement feels more like luck that actual skill, I say bring on the checkpoints.  But the checkpoints are only good during your current playthrough, meaning if you turn off the game, you have to start over from the beginning and collect all of the missing features you had previously collected.  But more importantly, you have to luck your way through the level again.  This problem is alleviated somewhat by playing on the Switch in that you can just pause the game, and put the system to sleep, but this means that you are unable to play any other game until you either quit the game or beat the level.

You know what, I am going to end the article here because I feel that I could just go on for a couple of more paragraphs about how Missing Features: 2D let me down.  I will say that I love the concept, I enjoyed the early levels and even to a certain extent, the complete mismatched sprites for the characters, in-game elements, music, sound effects and enemies added a kind of charm to the game, like you were playing a game pulled from random bits of pixel art downloaded randomly from the internet.  But the difficulty of the game got the better of me and I no longer enjoyed playing the game and when that happens, I do not really feel the need to force myself to slog through any more levels.  Had the level 10 been the end, I might have forgiven the game a bit, but after Level 11 and onto Level 12, like this article, I just had to stop.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Sleepwalking to the Gallows

P.S.  On that last screenshot, the stalactite did in fact hit me, but my issue with it was that where it fell from was out of frame, so there was no indication that you could trigger one to fall by standing there, which is what happened.  I believe the was