A cat-like child named Niko wakes up in a decrepit house, locked in a room with a bookshelf, a password-locked computer, and a TV remote control on the floor. It’s too dark to read the books and there’s no sign of a password anywhere – it's up to you to find a way out. Not long after, Niko stumbles upon a massive lightbulb in the basement. Carrying this prize into the lightless wastes, a prophetic robot claims Niko is the saviour – a messiah meant to carry the sun to the tower at the centre of the world to restore daylight. This is the set-up of OneShot: World Machine Edition, a short point-and-click adventure game originally developed in 2014 with an endearing, sombre story.
Games like OneShot are difficult to review because to delve too deeply into the narrative would ruin the experience. Just know this: developer Future Cat makes you – the player – a character in the story. Niko’s quest is framed as a game installed on a PC that functions as both a menu and narrative device. Options to choose wallpapers, change the colour scheme, view achievements, and the like take the form of desktop icons. Niko will frequently break the fourth wall to address you by your Nintendo Switch profile name as you guide her through a dying world. Future Cat makes clever use of this dichotomy between the desktop PC and the game within to add creative layers to an already compelling adventure.
Item-based puzzles – think The Secret Of Monkey Island with a touch more despair than blatant humour – bar Niko from advancing through three distinct areas. For example, a gatekeeping robot asked us to sign a ledger to pass yet had no pen. Off we went, guiding Niko throughout the crumbling Glen to trade for an inkwell and find something suitable to dip in it. This consisted of speaking with forgotten robots and downtrodden denizens, all of them full of charm and with an undercurrent of humour keeping things from getting too bleak. Unlike the point-and-click adventures of two or three decades ago, none of the puzzles stumped us, yet the dopamine rush hit us all the same when things slid into place. Before we knew it, the credits rolled, and we sat back, pensive from the bittersweet ending.
If we had to name a gripe, it stems from how OneShot was originally designed for actual PCs. Controlling the mouse pointer and the sizing of the in-game windows have been lost in the process of getting the game onto the console. We found it either hard to see the finer details of the pixelated world in windowed mode – especially with the Switch undocked – or too blurry when in full-screen mode with thick, distracting borders.
Still, these aren't major issues. In fact, we can’t think of a legitimate reason not to recommend OneShot: World Machine Edition to anyone with a passing interest in point-and-click adventures. There are, after all, much worse ways to spend an afternoon or two than guiding Niko through one of the most endearing and creative indie titles available on the Switch.
Comments 32
I think Nintendolife should use more numbers as a review score between 1-6. Broaden the spectrum. Most games are a 7, 8 or 9. Very difficult to determine which games are actually a lot better than others.
I played about 30 minutes of this game and just got stuck, and never continued. I plan to finish it at some point but I just found it rather irritating.
If I get this game I'll probably play exclusively in handheld mode but here one of the major cons is not being able to see well in handheld and that worries me 😟.
those 2 reasons alone: "Difficult to see in handheld mode
Unintuitive in-game controls" are enough reason for this game to get a 7 or a 6.
handheld mode is super important to at least half of the player base.
and controls... common.
Out of the hundreds of Switch games I've played, I'm yet to play one that is at all difficult to see in handheld mode for me even when reviews say so, so I'm not worried about that con at all.
Played a bit on PC years ago, got stuck early and dropped it. Will come back to it at some point.
@Friendly If a game is worth a 7-9/10 then that's what it should score. It's hard to say that some are better than others objectively like that so it's just up to you to determine which games cater the most to your personal tastes (hopefully the actual text in the article can help there).
There are plenty of 1-6/10 games around but most of them just don't get reviewed here or elsewhere in the first place because nobody has time to play them all and most of the bad ones are pretty easy to spot without a review anyway.
This is one of my all time favorite games. I really hope they release a physical version at some point. Will buy it for sure, great opportunity to replay this little gem.
Since Monkey Island was mentioned, I'll ask this:
Is this game more clever inventory puzzles ina cool setting like Maniac Mansion or focus way way too much on cool setting and puzzles are an after thought like Grim Fandango?
This is definitely one of those 5 out of 7 games.
@Friendly Agreed. I'm a big fan of music, and the only music review site I trust is one which utilizes their entire scoring spectrum. You know that if an album isn't good, they will just tell you, and if they award something a high score, it's because it actually deserved it. Too many review sites across media are basically just written by fans with no real discernment for what really makes an album or a game good or bad.
Edit: And yes, I know people will try to light me up with arguments about subjectivity in art, but as a musician...yes, there are absolutely objective standards that separate good and bad music, and I am sure it is the same in video games.
@Friendly I have a little list of all my games (well, not-so-little) and I went with a scoring out of 7 instead of out of 10 since it helped me with the fact that those lower numbers really don't get used a lot, but with the 7-scale it felt a lot more natural somehow. Though I assume they won't suddenly change their scoring system to that.
Feels like games just rank on different shades of 'good' nowadays, instead of really that much coming out that warrants lower scores. I just read it as 9 or 10 being considered great to amazing and 7-8 being good, with 5-6 being passable/mediocre. Leaves a lot of numbers that just signify 'bad' but that's how it goes.
@Diogmites why?
@benav @takoda @syton thanks for your responses. I just miss nuance in reviews lately. The whole industry scores 7-9’s. Very rarely there’s a 6 or a 10. And with so many games to choose from in each genre, more nuance in reviewer’s score (which are a bit of a demo-experience for me for games that don’t have a demo) could help me decide better what to spend my money on.
@Diogmites wrong.
A game having fixed 60 fps means that in that objective measure the game is better than one that stutters trying to stay stable at 20 or 30 fps.
And in music: the amount of false notes during the same play performed by different musicians can be a clear objective indicator which musician performed better at that piece of music.
@Friendly Reviewing shovelware 1 or 2 star games though takes time away from more interesting games that people actually want to read about though. There are only so many reviewers and so many hours in the day. So they have to pick and choose what to review.
@Indielink true.
But there are more numbers than just 1, 2, 7, 8 and 9 (and the sporadic 10).
I like the way switchup gets to their review scores. Broken down into sections and giving one overall score. With 3’s and 4’s in the mix for specific subjects as well.
@Diogmites if something can be measured it’s an objective measure.
Also, you’re getting dangerously close to Plato’s Ideology.
@StarPoint if they only had a trophy system for getting stuck, frustrated and quitting… I would have a ton of trophies….
@Friendly There are more numbers. But, again, do you want to read a review about crappy shovelware platformer #37958 that will get a 3 star review. No. It's a waste of everyone's time.
And for what it's worth. NL does throw out a LOT of 4/5/6 star reviews.
I think these kinda system OS games are neat, but they always seem to work better on a PC, like they are designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse.
On a Switch it's almost like the old UMPC experience.
@Friendly The industry standard is to grade games as if you were grading students' homework. Few games get 6 or lower because few developers are dumb or desperate enough to release something that isn't at least "passable".
@Indielink you could throw all the shovelware in the 1-bin and grade the rest from 2-10. Would make the review score more worth it to me.
@nimnio yours is the best explanation I think. Still, I think that it could be better done or not at all.
Maybe Gamexplains ‘hated / didn’t like / like / liked it a lot / loved’ is a better grading system than an integer.
@Diogmites it’s probably my intellect. That must be it.
@Diogmites maybe read my comments again and see that we agreed already.
You’re just saying the same stuff.
Yes, it’s an opinion / guideline. But it would guide me better if it either had a broader spectrum or a better definition of what the number would entail (switchup). Or else it’s probably better to just don’t use integers at all and just express a feeling about the game (gamexplain).
And being able to measure something is indeed objective. The word ‘scientifically’ does not add anything in your sentence.
Also, I think I’m good with my intellect. No need for you to doubt me. I do that to myself often enough.
https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews?score=6%2C5%2C4%2C3%2C2%2C1&system=switch-eshop%2Cnintendo-switch
@Syton Well said, I've seen too many fan reviews for media on sites like this, it's probably why I always take the praise with a grain of salt, like I see some 10/10 review or 9/10 review where the "critic" is clearly just a fan of the IP and sings nothing but praises for it. I mean I guess it could be useful in the sense of giving confirmation bias to the fellow fans, but it's pretty useless as far as someone who is not a fan is concerned.
@zbinks As a former reviewer here who seemed to get a large share of games that were in the 3-6 range, I thank you.
@zbinks by comparison: in the last three years: 12 pages of games with a review score of 1-6 (of which 5 pages with a 6) and 19 pages with a review score of 7 or 8.
To me the metric just isn’t saying much when it gets to the 7, 8 or 9 scores.
But I’ll stop here, I was just asking Nintendolife to be a bit more critical to the industry by stretching their numbers downwards a little and using a broader spectrum. For us as readers. It’ll make the true great games stand out even more.
I’ll mainly focus on the written parts of the review.
Overall this review was great btw. Might check out this game later on.
https://www.nintendolife.com/scoring
Keep in mind, when you don't have the staff or resources to review everything (or even close to everything), you do have to choose which games get a review and which don't. It's only natural for the site to do a bit of cherry-picking. It's certainly better for the reviewer (Who wants to spend days playing, analyzing and writing about a game they despise?), and the readership is likely to be more engaged with an article that provides a solid recommendation, than about something that falls in the range of "not bad" to "abysmal", though there are certainly exceptions (Ex: Balan Wonderworld).
When it comes to the games that haven't been reviewed, I think you'll find that there are way more games, in that mix, that would have been 1's - 6's, than 7's - 10's, even with shovelware removed from the equation.
@zbinks yes. I think you’re correct.
Anyway, to talk about the actual game, it’s great! Everyone should try it.
@StarPoint It’s important to explore and try to combine your items together or interact with things with those items selected. You should try it again!
Tap here to load 32 comments
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...