Distraint was a weird subject for a game… playing as a trouble lawyer, hunting down promotion within his legal practice by evicting a series of tenants from their properties whilst dealing with the whole moral dilemma of it in discussions with his deceased parents.
It also had a very distinct look about it as well with all the characters having huge heads.
It’s unusual for me to play a sequel on a different console, Distraint was purchased for pennies in an Xbox sale, but as I’m trying to avoid playing too many games merely for the points these days, as the sequel was included in a PSN sale… I grabbed it… it’s not like I don’t know the story from the first game, so I’m hardly going to miss out.
As the third game of Indie Fest 2024 it also has a hard act to follow, GRIS was a wonderful little platformer that didn’t go out of its way to frustrate or overwhelm the player, and had great graphics and sound to boot… that I can’t remember any soundtrack from the original Distraint leans me towards believing that, if there was one at all, it wasn’t of any notable quality, and graphically I’m expecting more of the same…
January 28th
Jessie Makkonen, the sole author of this, certainly has a style… and it’s visually distinctive… small bodies, huge heads and a much-reduced playing area… this all takes place as if you were looking through a letterbox, and it’s a very dark game graphically… even with the brightest turned up to 11 this is occasionally difficult to make out things on screen.
That it’s also an extension of Pixel-Art graphics do not help here.
In the first game you played Price, a junior in a law firm aiming to become a partner in the firm, thus he went about his job which, sadly for him, seemed to revolve around repossessing people’s homes… when one little old lady who has been evicted because of him, dies… it’s all much.
Throughout the game he wrestles with his own moral compass… he hates his job and the old ladies passing brings it to a head… it’s here that the sequel kicks in.
Price has decided to take his own life, and appears to be in a sort of limbo as he battles with his inner emotions… REASON points out him that he can make a good life for himself, if he just find HOPE… at the same time, FEAR is stalking him (and must be hidden from when he appears) and GREED, who helped get him into his current predicament, has to be dealt with as well.
All this is done through a series of locations, puzzles and dialogue in both the present and through flashbacks to his childhood… occasionally, as encouragement, Price gets to see the idyllic life he could have were he to find HOPE and move on without blasting his own brains out with a Shotgun.
It’s not a long game… but the strain on my eyes trying to see where I’m going at times has made a full run in one sitting impossible… and prompted me to book in another eye test in a week or so… but, while the subject matter is fairly dark, did the graphics have to be as dark as they are?
While I can accept that not every game I play through with an Indie budget is going to be as beautiful to look at as Gris, this game is an assault on the eye balls… in a previous title, Heal, the developer has shown they’re capable of so much more than we’ve been handed here.
February 1st
The end comes fairly swiftly, as Price discovers that the HOPE he’s looking for in life is inside him all along (which wasn’t hard to work out if you’ve played games for more than a few years) and that he just needed a little prompting to come to terms with that.
In the triumphant ending all his emotions and persona elements come together to help him break free, to give him the HOPE to not blast his own brains out with a shotgun… an action which leads to his meeting with his new neighbour, who bears an uncanny resemblance to LOVE that he had encountered in his visions, and the final scene leads to them going off for a drink and a chat.
While I enjoy Jesse’s output, the visual presentation here really lets the game down… it’s not full screen, the art style leads to some severe eye strain, and they’re just way too dark… sound could be better, while the dramatic music when you’re hiding from FEAR is fine, the rest is all rather sparse.
It’s delivering a message more than anything else, and while it does a really good job of getting that across, that is achieved despite the way the game is presented rather than because of the game itself… and as such my Indie Fest score here works out at 60%.