Reflections Preview – Muddy Waters

Video games offer the chance for players to both tell their own story and easily experience diverse viewpoints.

Video games offer the chance for players to both tell their own story and easily experience diverse viewpoints. Broken Window Studios, known for their horror production Grave , uses a specific system called Storyteller in their second game. It’s a real-world adventure in which players put themselves in the shoes of a young protagonist and make choices to see how they affect the future.

You’re a young adult who’s moving out of the house, and it’s the day to leave for college. Most of the things are packed, except a few memorabilia. Built in Unity Engine, Reflections has a first-person sandbox feel to it; most objects can be moved or opened in some way, like the many cupboards and shelves around the house. The developers aim for realism, and while you don’t have to do Sims -like things such as eat or watch TV, most of the items in the game will be interactive.

In the demo, which shows a shortened version of the first level, I started out in my room. The first thing to note is a binder with missing papers. The protagonist’s thoughts are known via text visible on the screen, noting that it would be good to find a couple of papers scattered in the house. I opened the drawer and put in the first sheet of paper, which clung easily to the binder. A key I found in a different drawer fit easily into the room’s door, teaching me that the keys match colors to keyholes. Sadly, there’s no inventory system, so when I found a vinyl record and a sheet of paper, I had to run back upstairs holding just one object. It doesn’t seem like there will be a real need for inventory in the game, however.

Color is an important theme in Reflections . Notably, almost everything in the game is bleak and colorless. It is a nice stylization, especially for distant objects like trees, which look like gray and white plaid patches. This key distinction is for objects used throughout the game. As they are acted upon (becoming “significant” for the player is how I look at it) they fill with color. It’s a mechanic that nicely pairs visual feedback with theme.

Beyond material objects, it’s the interactions with people that may impact the game’s storyline the most. As I went downstairs, a girl waited for me – my girlfriend from the area, saying goodbye as I left for college. I put on a vinyl to play some indie rock music, and ran to answer a ringing phone. It was my mother, reminding me to pack my things and call the movers. I turned to see the girl from earlier gone (it may have had something to do with the fact that I threw a couple of objects in her direction, don’t worry, standard testing procedure). In my next playthrough, I made sure to be nicer to my guest and actually called my mother before she called me – but her call happened later anyway, as though I didn’t call her.

As for the promised “full environment interaction,” Reflections feels pretty bare. True, the house already had most of the things packed, but there’s hardly any memorabilia to create attachment for the player and the character. There’s a binder with some papers and one photograph, but other than that, there isn’t a whole lot of meaningful actions the character can do (sans throw a basketball or horseshoes for fun, or fix the water downstairs). The game feels like a sandbox, but a fairly limited one for now. The girl stands in the same spot all day, and it’s also hard to tell when she has another thing to say, which forced me to check on her every few minutes.

Perhaps some conversation options would be a good idea, since dialogue feels very one-sided. Reflections goes along with the traditional mute protagonist present in a multitude of role-playing games, which is a bit of a letdown. Why not give a couple of dialogue options? Many games give dialogue options and still provide enough flexibility to make the player feel like they are the character. It’s weirdly one-sided currently, though that might work out better later on when the player has more choices in who he or she interacts with. The girl in the demo talks about how she thought they would always be together, and about childhood memories that the player has no idea about. It feels cheesy.

Sadly, I didn’t get to experience the Storyteller system in the demo, so there’s not much yet to say about how it will work exactly. Clearly, the biggest choices revolve around the people you deem important in your life and whom you get involved with. It seems that even cheating will be possible if there’s more than one love interest available. The full version will feature romance candidates of any gender and sexuality, which surely helps everyone get into character. There will then be three story acts to fully demonstrate the ramifications of player choices.

Reflections has the difficult task of balancing a clean, relatable character slate with creating enough material for players to care about. Depending on how much gamers need to fill in, it might be too bland to get invested in, and if there’s too much establishment, it may be too difficult to relate to.

But other aspects worry me as well. Will there be voice-acting? Will the main character remain mute? And how much can interacting with physical objects make us care? We’ve seen games like Gone Home pull it off. Yet even despite seeing only part of one act in Reflections , I  feel intrigued enough to do a full playthrough and see how the narrative unfolds.

Reflections has been Greenlit on Steam. The game’s available for pre-order at a discounted price on the official website, and is targeting a release for May on PC, Mac, and Linux, followed by a console launch later this Summer on PS4 and Xbox One.