I completed Roman Sands RE:Build late last night, and haven't had nearly enough time to digest it, but I'm keen to help get the word out and energise whatever algorithmic chicanery might contribute to this gorgeous, ugly thing making money. So! Roman Sands RE:Build is two exquisitely grim games locked in a collapsing binary orbit. You should play it, preferably before reading the rest of this review, which is only going to spoil and dilute its squalid magic.
Each of those component games is a short masterpiece, executed with huge prowess at every level of the art, sound, design and writing. They might seem totally dissimilar, at first. One game is a hyperactive, time-looping hotel job simulator in which you tend to some cartoonishly awful older guests, shifting incrementally between times of day as you hurry between parts of a garish and phantasmagorical resort that is being menaced by an approaching sun. It's a place without memory, in which activities reset when you stroll back into the sea at moonrise - a lovely spectacle of swirling stars and blissfully solid darkness.
The other component game is a meticulous, but rapidly deteriorating ocean base exploration sim, stewed in sexy cybernetic horror and good old-fashioned thanatophobia. It might remind you of Frictional's Soma, if Frictional's Soma had more toxic yuri. Here, you'll lumber about in a helmet with PDA and spanner, attempting to purge a radioactive, honeycomb-like infestation by repurposing chunks of machinery. Between descents, you'll listen to the denizen of another base enthuse over the radio about the sensuality of decay.
In practice, many things connect these diverging experiences. Aesthetics, for starters: Game 1 is luxuriant, spacious and frenzied, while Game 2 is dense, mulish and murky, but they are both broadly an exercise in getting relentlessly brainjacked by the colours pink through purple. I've heard the art and musical direction described as "breakcore meets vaporwave". Even if, like me, you're not very expert in these precedents, I'm sure you'll notice how careful Roman Sands is as a work of partial pastiche, how specific in its borrowings and allusions.
The games further share a love of baroque and strange interface design, spanning two HUD setups and a number of in-world devices. There's a more ominous, connecting thread of alchemy and arithmancy: each environment is rife with planetary symbols, magic circles, and a fascination with the number three. There are places where the worlds echo each other almost directly: for example, a growing heap of discarded, meat-clogged pipes that recalls a mounting pile of luggage in the hotel lobby. As each setting fragments beneath your curiosity, it becomes easier to peer across the divide. Sometimes, you can even stick a hand through and fondle the other game's bowels.
While there's a connecting plot, of sorts, each half of the game is sort of a retelling or refiguring of the other. The shared conceptual binary is maintenance, in the janitorial sense, versus transcendence. In each game you are a ground-down worker, subjected to a rigid and imbalanced, palpably doomed structure that is contemptuous or careless of you, but which depends absolutely on you to exist. You shore each realm up through your labour, while searching for your Exit.
The resort absorbs the bulk of the 10-hour playtime (it did in my first runthrough, anyway), and is the most openly hateful of the two environments. The guests – represented by spaghetti noodle caricatures and anime dialogue portraits - are immediately atrocious. There's Betty and Harold, a hectoring hag paired with a suffocatingly pleasant old gimmer. There's Bunk, a lecherous middle-aged drunk who is constantly throwing up on himself, and Sylvia, a more sophisticated predator, who receives your efforts at Good Service with seductive scorn.
Each guest has demands that vary depending on the time of day and location: fetch my hair curlers! Mix me a drink! Get me a book! Get me a better book! DO IT DO IT DO IT. Why are you still here? "All I want is for things to get done," Sylvia says at one point. The implied overall objective is to meet all these requests within a single loop, which is impossible at first. Completing tasks earns you XP that unlocks more options and features from run to run. Sounds like an entertaining puzzlebox, maybe, but if you embrace the progression rush you are giving into the game's undisguised efforts to characterise you as a spineless toady.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/roman-sands-rebuild-review
