Master Reboot
Review
Should you Reboot or give it the boot?
by Jonathan Fortin
reviewed on PC
Yet another demonic little girl
Master Reboot does deserve props for its unique visual style. It is vibrant and nightmarish, sometimes looking like TRON, other times like Silent Hill. But the graphics, like the gameplay, lack polish. The lighting system is extremely basic, the textures are unremarkable, and the models are blocky. As a result, the game often looks ugly and sloppy despite its stylistic touches. Fortunately, the atmospheric music helps keep the game's tone surreal and creepy.
This is good, because the game really, really wants to be scary. A demonic little girl haunts you every step of the way, giggling from afar and jumping out from lockers. She might be creepy if you haven't already seen a million other demonic little girls before, but gamers exposed to F.E.A.R. or Silent Hill or pretty much any Japanese horror film ever will roll their eyes. Even for the easily frightened, the demonic girl in Master Reboot shows up so frequently that any impact she might initially have is quickly lost.
Similarly, each level has a pink symbol which, if clicked, will show a demonic image and demotivational text. (For example, it might calls you a trapped play toy who will never escape, or tell you that you'll never amount to anything.) It's just never as creepy as it wants to be, especially since whenever you click, you hear the same cheesy screaming sound. Like with the demon girl, the evil pink symbols quickly lose any sense of shock or surprise.
The game won't be your master, but you'll probably have to reboot
What really kill this game are the bugs. There are graphical bugs. There are puzzle bugs. There are bugs that crash the entire game, forcing you to close the program and start it up again. This is especially frustrating because the game relies exclusively on auto-saving, and only saves each time you complete a room. You can lose entire chunks of progress from these crashes.
Master Reboot is ambitious to a fault. It wants to create a unique experience for the player, to tell a unique story and showcase a unique graphical style. There are beautiful moments that indicate a great deal of artistic vision. But the game feels unfinished in virtually every respect: the graphics, gameplay, and overall stability could have all been dramatically improved with another six months of development. It honestly feels like an alpha version, but it's being sold as a finished title for $15.
I wish I could say that this game was worth such a price, because it had a lot of potential. But the difference between this and such games as Gone Home and The Stanley Parable is how much care went into the development of the latter two. An interesting story isn't enough: the game has to function, and most of all has to be fun to play.
Hopefully Wales Interactive will spend more time on their next project. If they retain their artistic vision but use it to create something more polished, the result could be outstanding.
5.0
fun score
Pros
Atmospheric visual style and soundtrack, interesting story
Cons
Extremely unpolished, problematic puzzles, infested with bugs