Retro/Grade
Developer: 24 Caret Games
Platform: Windows (Free demo available)
Nominations: Excellence in Audio, Excellence in Design
Website
Description: Congratulations! You just saved the galaxy in an epic battle. Now do it backwards! To music!

Adam’s Thoughts:
Rewinding time is all the rage these days, (well, if you count the Prince of Persia series and Braid as a rage), but it mostly gets used by platformers and 3d action-adventure games as a way to mitigate difficulty. Retro/Grade is an attempt to port the idea into the rhythm genre, but as a challenge rather than a salve. You see, after a space battle so hardcore that it rips the very fabric of time and space, your little hero is sucked backward in time and must replay his epic struggle in rewind. So this time, in addition to dodging the enemy onslaught, you also have to catch up with all the shots you fired, so you can have been there when they were fired in the first place (Editor’s Note: Time travel tenses are awesome). Your shots arrive in time with the music, and you tap a fire button when they arrive. So if you’re accustomed to sight reading Guitar Hero songs, then you’ll probably be ready for Retro/Grade.

Failure means that you’ve damaged the space/time continuum, and nobody wants that. Happily, you can move time forward on a limited power bar, so you can reverse the reversed time and fix whatever you did wrong. It’s a clever take on the time travel mechanic that should be fun to play. Also cool is the fact that you principally play backwards through time, so the score has to sound as good and better backwards than it does forward (which seems to be the case in the available movies). The explosions and weapons fire are also backmasked, and it seems like having a soundscape that works backward and forward is what scored the audio nomination for Retro/Grade.

Katie’s Thoughts:
When Jonathon Blow announced Braid, a lot of independent developers started asking themselves what they would do with a game about time manipulation. Scarybug Games made Chronotron. 24 Carat games has made Retro/Grade, which is a rhythm game disguised as a shooter with the bonus awesome of time manipulation.

The premise, that you have engaged in such an epic battle of awesomeness that your direction in time has been reversed, and must now go catch all the bullets you used, while at the same time dodging the shots fired at you, is extremely charming. Fortunately for you, you managed to synch all of your shots up with either the beat or the off beat of the music you were listening to during the fight, so by listening to your battle music on rewind, you have audio cues to help you unfire all those bullets on to victory. Also luckily for you, you were shipped out with a can of “go forward again” juice, allowing you a limited-time chance to fix your backwards mistakes by going forwards in time and then backwards again. (Think Prince of Persia sand.) Once you achieve epic backwards victory, the game treats you to what the battle looked like in forward time, which turns out to be hellishly fast. The music works great in both directions, and luckily for both our fingers and sanity, we only have to play the game backwards.

The current demo is still a little buggy, but certainly worth the effort of squinting through the fuzzy menus and avoiding the options menu like the plague (seriously, don’t go to “Options”). Trying the game with a guitar controller is something I hope to try out at the GDC, and I imagine will enforce the feeling that this is actually a rhythm game with a cool shooter skin.

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Tags:   Excellence in Audio · Excellence in Design · GDC · IGFNo Comments

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