Degrees of Separation (2019)

Playing this with my partner, and we are enjoying the original game mechanics and how they let us work together in various creative ways. It's quite nice that we can run off and wander into different directions, and we don't get stuck on the side of the screen, waiting for the other to come our way: the game just switched to split screen fluidly.

The puzzles are fun and creative. Every level has their own mechanic that you only use in that level. The quality of the puzzles depends a lot on the specific mechanic. Some are very good and lead to lots of clever brainy puzzling, some require running/jumping/climbing that's quite finicky, and that feels like a shame for a good puzzle game. One of them felt more like slicing into the solution. The levels aren't very long, so you can play one in a relaxed bout of gaming. Its also completely okay to just skip a puzzle and go on to the next one.

The story is forgettable, you literally zone out while listening to the narrator, but that's fine. The art is quite pretty, but sadly your sprite hardly moves, giving it a very stilted air. I get this is the paper cut out aesthetic, but I've seen that done better. Still, we're here for the original coop puzzling and on that count it definitely delivers.

This is one of the few games I have bought the day it came out, mostly because my partner said they wanted to play it with me (after seeing ads on YouTube). We enjoyed the art style and found the puzzles approachable and sometimes even fun. But this game had one big problem that really kept us from enjoying it as much as we could have. Here is my (and our) experiences:

--The Good--

We have a collection of picture books, and this game fits in perfectly with that aesthetic. The art was simple in scope but also detailed, not flashy but full of tiny details to feast on. The dynamic effect of having one half of the screen being Winter and the other being Summer, with the line between moving with the characters, was more interesting than it sounds on paper (seriously, check out a video of it).

The puzzles were also a good mix of difficult and easy. We have no experience with puzzle games like this but managed to get about 85% of all the scarf pieces (the key collectible of this game). And as far as we can tell there is no special ending for collecting 100% which helped keep the stress levels manageable, since we are both perfectionists in our own ways.

--The Bad--

Much as we appreciated the approachability and aesthetic of this game, it did have some pretty big problems. The game's difficulty was inconsistent, with puzzles of varying difficulty all sprinkled together. More than once we would be moving at a good clip through the game only to have all momentum crushed by a puzzle we couldn't solve. Frustration increased when the next two or three puzzles were painfully easy, leading us to go back to the one that stumped us only to continue to be stumped. Controls for the game were also too floaty. We had some real hair-pulling moments during the more complicated platform sections. More than once it was actually harder to land our jump on top of the platform at the start of the puzzle than to navigate the rest of the puzzle, mostly because it is really easy to over-shoot or get caught on edges.

We've played enough games though that those things can be forgiven. Indie games often lack some polish. What made this game really difficult to enjoy was the story and the writing. I can see why they released this game on Valentine's day. It is supposed to be some dramatic love story. But the actual narrative didn't really make sense, and not in the fantastical picture book kind of way where things are weird and left open to the imagination. The story just felt empty and pointless. The characters had no motivation, so there was no emotional urgency for us as we played, even though the game kept telling us we should be feeling emotional. The characters were supposed to be in love or falling in love, but the scope of the game was just too short for that to feel real at all. The writing itself was also bad enough that my partner and I bonded more over making fun of it than enjoying it. It is the sort of flowery love-stuff you write in high school when you don't really know what love and pain actually are. Since we are in our mid-thirties, having been together for 15 years, this style of writing fell especially flat. It was made even worse because the narrator was constantly speaking over what we were doing, telling us how we should feel. Sometimes the narrator's dialogue would trigger a little too early, so she would be talking over us as we tried to figure out the end of a puzzle.

That lack of emotional connection between us and the game characters also made the last level a real slog and the ending of the game almost meaningless.

--The Verdict--

This game has some really good concepts. It has a focused mechanic that is changed, played with, and iterated on throughout the game (just like any good Mario game). But the whole thing really falls apart in the actual execution, whether it is due to poor level design (not poor puzzle design), painfully imprecise controls (it's 2019 ya'll, it should not be this hard to make character sprites move well), or the amateurish writing. Less words, more control, and a definable difficulty curve would have probably made this one of our favorite co-ops of the year.

If you are looking for a slow-paced puzzler co-op this might work for you. Just watch some videos first to make sure, and catch it on sale.