The game is set in 2120 aboard a station on the moon where an artifact known as the Relicta has been discovered, and scientific experiments are being done in secret to discover what properties it holds. You play as Dr. Angelica Patel – a physicist on the Chandara base, who is testing a new device that allows the use to manipulate gravity and magnetism.
The moon base is soon involved in an accident involving the Relicta, separating all of the members of the crew, including Kira, Angelica’s daughter. Angelica finds herself having to save the rest of the crew at the base, all while having to worry about the Relica and the secrets that it holds.
There is quite a bit of story here that I can’t include here, but I don’t want to ruin a lot of it by revealing too much, but just be warned that this is a dialogue heavy puzzle game.
Relicta is a first-person physics-based puzzle game where the main gameplay mechanic is using magnetism and gravity to solve all of it’s puzzles. While Relicta is obviously a portal clone, there are also comparisons that can be made to Magrunner: Dark Pulse, which also heavily uses magnets for it’s puzzles and is another Portal clone. But Relicta is more involved with it’s magnetic puzzles.
The puzzles of Relicta focus around magnetic cubes where you can switch between a negative and positive charge, indicated by them turning either red or blue, or having no charge at all, which is controlled with the gloves that your character has as part of her suit.
Puzzles contain the obvious game mechanics, such as making the cubes attract or repel each other, and using them on pressure plates to open up doors or turn off conveniently colored energy fields, purple only allowing the player to go through, green only allowing cubes, and yellow preventing both from coming through.
But like I mentioned earlier, the cubes have an anti-gravity field too. Sometimes you’ll have to use the cubes to activate a button that is located on a wall or the ceiling, or guide them through a level using magnetic places located on walls, some of which you can change yourself, and even ride them to get to the location that you need to be at.
Unfortunately, there were a few times where I was stuck solving a puzzle, only to find out that the game had introduced a new mechanic that I had no idea was there and I had to eventually cave in and look up a walkthrough just to figure out what I had to do. After that, the puzzles weren’t too bad, it’s just the initial not knowing what to do that was frustrating.
This makes the game more tedious that it should be. Some sort of audio cue indicating what I should do would have been helpful, whether it something coming from what I’m supposed to be paying attention to, or have my character briefly mention something after a while of being stuck in a certain area. I had no clue what the game wanted me to look at, and it took me way too long to figure out a piece of the puzzle.
There were even a few instances where I was looking for one of the magnetic boxes required to finish a puzzle only to find out that it was somewhere that I didn’t think to look. Some slight telegraphing would have significantly improved this game.
Also, the length in between autosaves is a little too long. There have been times where I was half way through a puzzle, had to close the game for whatever reason, and come back to it and have to spend 5 minutes catching up to where I was last just so I could continue. Even if the game didn’t include more autosaves, I would have loved the option for a manual save, but I don’t know if there was a technical reason it couldn’t have been included or it was just the way that the developers designed the game.
These few minor changes would have made the game a much smoother experience.
Also, some of the dialogue is a bit awkward, such as one character calling another an “Orbi-Boomer” and having sarcasm for every other line, for at least the first half of the game, or having PDAs and dialogue filled with references to other media. The game is aware of the kind of story that it wrote for itself in the latter half, It gets a little tedious after awhile, especially with how self-aware it is.
The visuals are pretty solid, even it’s pretty obvious that areas are designed to be more like rooms than actual locations. It is nice to see off into the distance beyond the areas that you’re in and seeing some nice looking locations, which there is a variety off.
As you’re solving puzzles and trying to figure out what is going on, you have to move in between domes, which contain a range of biomes of Earth-based terrains, which range from a large dense forest and nice blue sky, to snowy wasteland with icy caves, and even a seemingly endless desert. This does a lot to separate itself from something like Portal, instead of having dull tech filled room after room, you have another vista to look at, which is only separated by a few moments of the sci-fi aesthetic of a moon base.
The games visuals are so nice that it comes with a photo mode, where you can take photos of the surrounding environment, and the photo mode comes with Instagram like filters, so you can have fun customizing your pictures to your hearts content. This is one of those features that you wonder why it isn’t in more games with nice looking art styles and graphics.
Relicta is quite a lengthy game, and I feel like that being a good or a bad thing is going to be up to the player. Some might want more of the game, but there just wasn’t enough variety in the gameplay and by the end of the game I was getting a little exhausted. If you’re going to play, maybe take a few breaks while playing and go do something else.
Despite a lot of my complaints with Relicta and the fact that it’s not a game that I would go immediately to with recommending first person puzzle games, there is still something to be enjoyed here. And anyone who is looking for their fix of something that only a Portal-like game can fill, it’s certainly worth checking out, but unfortunately, it’s a lukewarm recommendation from me.
Despite my negativity, I would like to see it’s developer ‘Mighty Polygon’ continue just to see something more polished from them.
https://www.gog.com/game/relicta
https://store.steampowered.com/app/941570/Relicta/
https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/p/relicta
Cult Classic Corner - Video Games 