Master Reboot Review

After considerable deliberation, I have decided that the most upsetting thing about Master Reboot is the way it has rudely disrupted several of my favourite blanket statements. In recent years it’s been ruddy difficult to get your hands on a decent survival horror game that wasn’t just a regular action game with excess ketchup and flickery lights, but I always had the opportunity to point at things like Amnesia, Outlast or some of the better Slender derivatives and explain that great survival horror hasn’t disappeared at all, just moved onto indie pastures. Now, however, that statement has to lug around a troublesome cancerous asterisk, dripping cliché like congealed pus and murmuring, ever so quietly, of jump scares and arbitrary puzzles. Oh dear, did that give it away a bit too early?

Still, the central premise of Master Reboot – a first-person psychological horror adventure game, like the kind we like – is intriguing if nothing else. Falling somewhere in the middle of a big science-fiction triangle whose three points are defined by Remember Me, Dreamweb and The Matrix, the world of Master Reboot is dominated by a technology known as the Soul Cloud, a sort of global network composed out of the collective digitised memories of human beings who presumably checked the right boxes when they installed their favourite search toolbar. When users die, their personalities are uploaded into the Soul Cloud so that they may continue to exist and relive the least cringe-worthy moments of their lives for all eternity. Oh yes, and they can continue to be visited by their friends and family via methods that are never entirely made clear. Overall it’s a nice concept rich with potential philosophical conundrums to dig up, which is why it’s so bemusing that Master Reboot seems so eager to hurry past them, its collar turned up and its hat pulled down over its face. Not every game needs to ask the big questions, but having such an extensive framing device for what turns out to be a rather small, personal tale feels like setting the theatre up for a rehearsal of Macbeth only to find the janitor’s nephew standing on the stage practising his public speaking assignment.

Annoyingly, that small personal story I alluded to doesn’t seem particularly interested in actually involving the player, casting them as the standard faceless nameless protagonist and never really expanding beyond that. Questions like who you are, what your goal is, and what you’re actually achieving are just sort of skimmed over in favour of focussing on an entirely different character. Most of the game is spent traversing the memories of a young woman – one who will remain unnamed for spoiler purposes – and generally piecing together what happened to her by visiting key moments in her life, from cradle to grave. However, all is not well in this land, and after a misdiagnosis by the local security system, it transpires that you are being pursued by an anti-virus measure known as Seren.exe, which takes the form of the same girl from The Ring and F.E.A.R and every half-hearted piece of horror media piggybacking off their success. The exact reason for why Seren takes this form, as well as what it actually plans to do with you, is also handily glossed over, but it does give context to your actions: you are a speck in the system, an imperfection in a virtual structure to be wiped out by a soulless subroutine. It has to be said that as a player I felt quite dishearteningly left out of the main scheme of things. Are you absolutely sure I need to be here, Master Reboot? I mean, I can see you really want to tell me this story, but I’d like to be involved in it in some capacity beyond just being ferried through your levels. Why should I even care about this person? Can I fill in the blanks?

To be honest, the storytelling overall is more impenetrable than a copy of Primer being played at the bottom of a well. Locating neon-blue rubber ducks – no, I don’t know why they decided on neon-blue rubber ducks – inside the memories will conjure up a related document, scrap of paper or picture that helps to build a general picture of why each memory is significant, but it’s a seriously shaky move when you step back and consider it. This game is relying on a scavenger hunt mechanic to deliver important plot points to the player, so either it’s happy for you to miss half the cues or it’s completely confident in your dedication to the act of searching through every nook and cranny for arbitrary trinkets. Cutscenes generally get played at the end of each memory as well, though their effectiveness at explaining what’s going on is, again, limited. You’ll probably end up in the dark either way, so my advice is to skip the whole thing and try to concentrate on the gameplay.

Here is where that elaborate framing device I mentioned actually starts being useful. Being trapped on a server full of somebody’s fragmented memories gives Master Reboot the license to get a bit abstract with its environments and gameplay rules, letting it set levels on, say, a passenger jet, or a sand bar, without any need to logically connect them. Sure, it’s a cop-out – one step above playing the ‘it was all a dream’ card – but it’s a good cop-out, the sort that the game avoids drawing attention to. I suspended my disbelief appropriately and, for a while, was happy to see the game break out of the usual predictable cycle of horror game environments. It’s just a shame that my entertainment was being spoiled by the presence of an annoying child with a penchant for jumping suddenly out at me.

Yes, every now and then Master Reboot remembers that it’s trying to be a horror game and consequentially sends Seren after you in a variety of scripted sequences, but the level of subtlety involved in hammering them into place is equivalent to being beaten over the head with a stoplight by a fourth-tier Batman villain. It’s disappointing, really, because Master Reboot has a grasp, albeit a shaky one, on what it means to be a horror game: it understands the value of pacing and atmosphere, the need to space out scares and such, but the implementation can get so ham-fisted as to become almost laughable. I quickly learned to sigh with defeat every time I encountered a darkened corridor or a cupboard large enough to accommodate a human being, knowing that I was in for another trite encounter with Her Spookyship. Why, hello again. Yes, I would love to indulge in staving you off with another button-mashing sequence.

Perhaps the pacing could have been saved if Master Reboot had actually been conceived as a game rather than a slightly offbeat haunted house ride. I can picture the developers clutching their heads in despair as they tried to think of gameplay elements to add to their spook-em-up, before throwing their arms in the air and just slotting anything in anywhere it would fit. Platforming shows up occasionally, like an old friend that you don’t really talk to any more, but the main arbitrary gameplay element at work is puzzles. The definition of ‘puzzles’, though, and their relevance to the actual game environment, is stretched until you could tie it between two goalposts and use it as a catapult. Many take the form of more thrice-damned scavenger hunts – you know, because nothing raises the tension like being forced to backtrack and meticulously search through an already-visited area – but some just seem to be looking to waste your time, like the one that asks you to shoot down a set of unmoving targets with your perfectly accurate cork gun or – and I’m not making this up – makes you demonstrate the order of the planets in the solar system. Pack up and go home, we’ve resorted to pop science quiz questions.

Creating a lack of a logical continuity between the puzzles and the rest of the gameplay might have been a deliberate choice on Master Reboot’s part in order to enforce the dream-like state of the game’s environments, and I suppose if you want to look at it that way then it certainly succeeds, in the same way that a man with a pizza cutter, a bottle of whiskey and some perseverance might ‘succeed’ at performing his own gastrectomy. Dreams do not make for good gameplay. When your actions have no obvious meaning and the results have no reward beyond opening up your path in completely unrelated ways, the endless loop of input and output that’s integral to gaming grinds to a hold, leaving you doing a collection of pointless tasks for no other reason than the implicit assurance that completing them will advance you to the next part of the game.

Still, an indie game with a budget as minuscule as this can be forgiven for padding its playing time a bit, surely? Suit yourself, but when the game is still shorter than a bonfire night on Io it starts to beg the question on whether it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board until you have some more ideas. Three hours from beginning to end, so if you’re hoping for a time-sink then you might want to look elsewhere.

Might as well go over the visual style. Broadly speaking it’s like a Saturday morning cartoon viewed through the lens of a student’s Unity project; all twisted proportions, bright colours and flat shaded polygons. Non-committal terms like ‘unique’ are sure to be thrown at it, just like anything that isn’t shooting for photorealism or aping Minecraft, but being unique doesn’t mean anything. Going to a job interview dressed as a theme park mascot might make you stand out from the crowd, but it doesn’t make you any better qualified to handle bank transactions. So, while Master Reboot’s aesthetic might provide at some respite from current gen graphics, the novelty quickly wears thin, and the distorted polygon fantasy begins to shred immersion like an enraged combine harvester in a paper mill. Some of the abstract areas are really quite pretty, laced with colourful lighting effects and such, but with no context and – often – nothing to actually do in them, they more often than not left me wanting. “Well, seen all that,” I found myself thinking, within moments of entering the level. “Now where’s the button to get me out of here?”

What’s next on the big nasty game reviewer list? Performance, right. I’ve been having a bit of trouble with this business ever since Day One widened my perspective on how hideously broken a game can be and still get a review score, and as a direct result, while Master Reboot is not a bug-free game by any means, I no longer feel obliged to burn it at the stake for every little transgression it commits. As a matter of fact it only crashed once, although – considering its relative length – that may be one time too many. More common is simple acts of crude design, like the time I walked in the wrong direction moments before a scripted sequence unfolded and ended up trapped by a collapsed wall, or the time I died and respawned to find that the level hadn’t actually reset, resulting in me getting constantly chased down and murdered with no way out. It’s the sort of thing you could always just shrug off by restarting the level, but then, who would go to that much effort?

Why bother with all this, though? After all, there’s only one question that’s really important when it comes to horror games: is it scary? Well yes, it is – when it’s not faffing about, of course – which might be all you need for fifteen dollars for all I know, but I’m hesitant to give it a gold star here because it seems to be going for the low blows an awful lot. Atmosphere, build-up and pacing take a back seat, with the game instead just letting the twenty-first-century equivalent of the bogeyman jump out of a closet at the player every now and then and making their primal response do the rest, which I personally feel really misses a lot of potential. What happened to the practice of creating a creeping sense of oppression, or loneliness, or pronounced distaste? A good horror experience engages the brain on some level besides just blunt impact, creating a sense of fear beyond just worrying about when the next jump-scare is going to occur, and Master Reboot, sadly, does not. It knows how to scare, but not how to really reach in and pull the necessary psychological levers to be truly satisfying.

Come to think of it, that largely defines Master Reboot as a whole: clearly defined motives with only a poor grasp on how to achieve them. It is a vision – quite a nice vision when you think about it – but its translation to a tangible medium has crippled it in every department. The story might have been nice if it had been delivered properly, the gameplay would have been acceptable – if a little bit devoid of anything except walking around – if it hadn’t been preoccupied with dressing itself up in shoehorned arbitrary nonsense, and the atmosphere might have been retained if it hadn’t spent so much time going off on a tangent and inexpertly trying to make you soil yourself. Added up, they contribute to a game that’s passable at best, and usually well below that. Unless you’re so starved for a horror gaming experience that you’ve taken to playing Amnesia blindfolded, Master Reboot doesn’t get a recommendation.