Sad Cat Studios/Thunderful Publishing
PC, Xbox, Game Pass (At time of writing)
$20US/$26CDN
Buy DRM-free from GOG
The only story spoilers are for things revealed in the first chapter.
Two things I love are cyberpunk and well done pixel art so when I first got word of REPLACED, I was very interested. The Steam demo that debuted during the last Next Fest piqued that even more. I'm hit and miss in my views when it comes to what I call "story platformers" but this one had cool looking combat and multiple characters with dialogue, plus the aforementioned cyberpunk. There are things to like here but also a lot of sixth generation design choices and a lack of solid pacing that dampen the experience somewhat.
REPLACED takes place in a neat alternative history cyberpunk world. A nuke was set off in the US in the 60s that killed a lot of the population and caused widespread environmental devastation. A group called Phoenix came together out of this calamity and aimed to create a new and better society out of what remained. As you'll discover to no surprise, they eventually became your common power hungry cyberpunk dystopia corpos, holed up in their city while the dregs are cast outside to fend for themselves. It's now 1984 and in this world, technology was in a different place by then. You are a scientist working on an artificial superintelligence that you're creating with seemingly altruistic goals. An accident causes a major malfunction that makes your mind and the AI fuse together inside your head. You end up outside the walls of the city and have to find your way back.
There's a lot more to it than that and you confront some hard questions about morality and the nature of man and machine. It's a linear tale and there's no branching paths based on choices or anything, but it's well told without needing pages of dialogue and had a few twists that surprised me. You can learn a lot more in the various text logs you'll pick up along the way and while you can get the gist without them, they do add some tasty flavour.
This story along with the killer art style and soundtrack are the real highlights here. Some readers might remember The Last Night, one of the first showcases of this style that captured imaginations back when it was announced...in 2014. That's one year shy than the development cycle of the infamous Duke Nukem Forever and four years before REPLACED even started development. There's been all kinds of stories about why that still hasn't seen the light of day, but the lead dev seems to spend most of his time posting pretentious drivel on Twitter the last time I looked so I don't think it's coming soon, if ever. REPLACED rekindled a lot of that hype to their benefit and good on them for it. Every inch of this world (especially on an HDR display) is just soaked in style and though it's played in 2D, it is in a 3D engine, which allows for some amazing camera angles and set pieces. The blown out colours almost glitchy look to some of the environments evoke a lot of the same feelings Cyberpunk 2077 did in me, while in a much lower fidelity style. It's impressive and I really hope to see more developers make use of it.
Where things got decidedly less enjoyable for me was in the core mechanics and pacing. This is a "story platformer" at heart, though I'm happy to see it break typecasting by adding multiple characters with dialogue (albeit text only) and actual combat, on top of the usual sprinkling of puzzles, none of which are very hard. Thing is, the average "story platformer" is 3-5 hours long. This one took me over 13. That's fine and indeed, you get a lot of game for the asking price. The problem is that big chunks of it feel like filler. Your character doesn't so much run as jog and there are long stretches where that's the only thing happening. The scenery's nice and all, but I'd like to be doing something during these stretches. There's also a couple of chapters where you're in no threat hub areas and can do optional side quests, but these are just running back and forth to opposite sides of the map to fetch something. They're boring and though they do occasionally reward you with character upgrades and achievements, you aren't missing much by skipping them.
Then there's the many cutscenes, where most of the dialogue takes place. Except for some reason, you can't advance conversations manually during these and the game assumes you're a slow reader to boot. They also really want you to take in the gorgeous visuals because they have brutally slow camera movements that hang for way too long. You can skip them but even then, you have to bring up the menu, select skip, wait for a slow fade down, following by a long black screen, then another slow fade up. There's also a notable load time between each scene and you'll be seeing those regularly. None of these on their own would be too big a problem but when you add them all together, you have a game that could have been 4-5 hours shorter and not only wouldn't have lost anything, but felt a lot tighter.
Where REPLACED really stands out from its genre counterparts is combat, in that it has any at all. It's a good addition and something you can tell the devs put a lot of work into, but it also misses being great and ends up merely decent. It uses what many call "Batman combat" from the Arkham series, which relies on rhythm and timing along with smart use of your abilities and knowing the attack patterns of each enemy. It works and looks badass in spots, but a notable lag in the control response will lead to a lot of "I totally hit that in time!" and this goes for the many platforming sections as well. I tried it on both Xbox and PC and it's the same on both. Dying to either combat or platforming just sends you back to a checkpoint and while some of these are terribly placed and often make you rewatch (or skip) a cutscene before a battle, the penalty for failure isn't too harsh and at least on normal, I didn't lose very often anyway. It's nice to see combat and more advanced platforming start showing up in the genre, but it has the flow of an early Prince of Persia game, rather than something from the modern era and I don't think it had to be as frustrating as it was. The game also hitches every time it saves and that happens a lot so you start to notice it quickly.
There's also no New Game Plus or even a chapter select option, the latter of which is practically law with this genre. Many achievements are tied to collectibles and pulling off a certain number of specialty combat moves so it's baffling to me why this was left out. I really hope they patch that in at some point because there's no way I'd play all that filler again just to scrape those up.
Don't get me wrong, REPLACED is a fine addition to the "story platformer" genre. Indeed, the narrative is one of its highlights and even at my most frustrated with how it played, the style and vibe always had me transfixed. But it also feels like many of their design decisions were things the industry largely grew out of after the PS2 era and the ton of filler makes it seem like they either meant to put in more active content than they had time for or that they just loved making these environments and no one along the way told them "Guys, it's too much." If you've got the 10-12 hours and love cyberpunk, I think you'll still enjoy it. General sentiment from players is pretty positive so maybe my issues won't be as much an issue for you. If you're not sure, there is a demo on Steam that doesn't showcase the pacing issues, but does show the combat and platforming, so you can always determine it for yourself.
I hope Sad Cat Studios does well enough from this to make another one. If they can tighten things up, it could go from merely a good game to a top contender in the genre.
