North

North is a game that wants to make a point. It's a brand new first-person adventure game that hopes to disorient you, confuse you and make you feel like a stranger in an openly hostile land. It wants to give gamers a look inside the struggles that come with immigrating to a new country and feeling like an outsider, a theme that is both topical and rife with possibilities. Unfortunately, there's a big difference between wanting to do something and actually doing it, and North proves to be a messy experience that does little more than muddy the waters.

This is the story of an alien who is forced to move to the country to the north in order to avoid persecution. He did this knowing that he would be leaving his family behind, so he makes it a point to send frequent letters and money to his sister in the south. He updates her on his job, living conditions and mental health, all while doing everything he can to earn the documents needed to legally immigrate to the new country.

You'll discover early on that a lot of the game is about approximating the common struggles found in the immigrant experience. This involves working a terrible, back-breaking job in the worst conditions possible. It involves sleeping on the floor in a dumpy apartment shared by two other aliens. It involves coming to grips with that feeling that you are alone in a city that may never understand you.

No matter where your politics land, I think there's value in this kind of video game experience. Had this game delivered on the idea and given us a deeply emotional and personal story that forced us to see a different point of view, then this review would have likely gone in a completely different direction. But I don't think this game quite makes the point the developer was hoping it would make.

This is the kind of game that can be beat in anywhere between twenty minutes and an hour, which should give you an idea just how straight-forward everything is. You'll only have to work that back-breaking job once, you'll never actually sleep in that broken-down apartment and you'll have to do anything to survive. Even the more complicated puzzles, such as when you have to prove that you aren't guilty, can be solved by simply talking to the man outside the police station. If anything, this game makes it look like immigrants have an easy time earning their citizenship and fitting in with society, which runs counter to the point I think they are trying to make.

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Normally, this type of game would flesh out the simplistic puzzles and small area with a compelling story that kept you glued to the screen every step of the way. But the letters you send to your sister aren't as story-heavy as you might think, as they are mostly there to help you figure out how to solve some of the more obtuse challenges. There's nothing here to get invested in. I found that I honestly didn't care about the alien character and his sister, a problem only made worse when you realize that he struggles for all of about twenty minutes.

Beyond having a lackluster story, North is also a mess from a technical level. I was forced to restart from the beginning multiple times due to the game glitching on me. A good example of that is during a dream sequence where you're supposed to walk down a narrow path and pretend to be gay. It's easy to get caught in the geometry and pushed off to the side, where you're trapped with no way to escape. And because there is no save state or even a main menu, you're forced to start the whole thing from the beginning. This seems like bad design.

Speaking of which, the game also won't allow you to change the control layout. When it comes to first-person aiming, I prefer an inverted analog stick, an option that is not supported in any capacity in North. I was able to get used to the aiming, but the game never felt natural to me. I can't believe I'm playing a first-person game in 2018 that doesn't give you the option to switch aiming.

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The truth is, there's a lot about this game that doesn't feel modern. The look is purposely rough, evoking the kind of ugly, low-polygon graphics you saw on the original PlayStation and Saturn. This is the kind of thing that could have been done to great effect, had the rest of the game delivered on the promise of making you feel confused and disoriented. The best part of this game is the music, which is used far too sparingly.

There's a case to be made that we need more games that attempt to tell personal stories about tough topics. What we don't need are more games like North. This is a ham-fisted attempt to bring people into the struggle that may end up having the opposite results. North is an ugly, simple and glitchy adventure game that is every bit as boring as it is short.