Games have evolved since ‘getting a high score’ or ‘completing levels in record-time’ was the be-all-and-end-all. For me, Freebird Games’ To The Moon set a precedent for modern (Huh? To The Moon was 15 years ago…?) narrative adventures — dialogue and minigames take center stage while the music, direction and design create a brilliant game experience, even without a focus on traditional “Gameplay”.
Pluralys is the latest indie to tackle the narrative adventure, claiming to be “an RPG focused on exploration, comedy and intrigue”. While it certainly contains all of those things, the coherency of the experience is undermined with bloated traversal (if holding WASD for hours counts as “traversal”) and an inability to hammer home consequences of your actions beyond a surface level.
A strong start that, in hindsight, shows you all you need to know
In the opening hour of Plurarlys you’re a doctor in a hospital, going about some tasks and getting acquainted with the style of gameplay. Namely, walking up and interacting with everything in sight for crumbs of exposition, comedy and world-building.
There’s some light puzzling, but the majority of the time is spent moving through vast hallways at a snail’s pace. Any satisfaction of solving a puzzle is dissipated by the time you actually reach the place to interact with, and fortunately for me I have a good working memory when it comes to mapping and navigation. Even in the opening prelude, I can see the level design and mapless navigation turning players off immediately.
The world itself is incredibly built, though. Within minutes you’ve seen a noticeboard about an escaped horse loose inside the hospital, a shady man in a black trenchcoat off-screen and a surgeon who has a TV screen for a head — all the trappings of a hospital!
The prologue also set the scene for this strange, dark undertone that the entire game alludes to. I caught a corridor phone call about a woman going into labour, I saw an eye-less child muttering that I have files to report and a childbirth to attend, before sharply cutting himself off with “Ah, no, not yet”.
The intrigue and mystery was thick enough to slice.
Was this setting up a Cthulu-esque birth of a God? Or simply a foreshadow of a wholesome family scene later in the game? These are exactly the sorts of questions and thought processes the game wants to instill in you, fuelling your desire to uncover the world and its weirdness.
So where does it all go wrong?
Dozens of great moments doesn’t redeem the physical pace of the world
Once you’re out the prologue it’s more of the same, only now in a larger open world and with our main protagonist — Elie. There’s a lot going on in the world, to its credit. I could wax lyrical about the number of hearty chuckles the game gave me, or the number of times I went wide-eyed with an uncertain fear from those consistently unsettling undertones the game has. From quests about reuniting bodies with their souls, saving manipulated Zeings (A term for the many types of alien in the game) or helping a couple on a date “seal the deal”, Pluralys tries its darndest to be consistently interesting and fresh.
It does this mainly through the pager mechanic. As a heroine in a narrative RPG about changing the world and actions having consequences, of course you have access to a magical pager. Using it, you can pause time and remotely examine people, move objects and more. If you thought all this game had was spamming interact, I can at the very least attest that no, they put some thought into having gameplay diversity in the puzzles via the pager.
The problem with all this weirdness and greatness is that it all exists in a game that feels like it doesn’t want to be played. The Zeings are fun, the quest themes are deep and impactful, the things you uncover during exploration are intriguing…but navigating to and taking part in any of that is pure tedium. Slow movement, a lack of any navigational aids (Which even as someone who can remember “I went to that house in chapter 1, I know where that is” still had me running circles around the larger maps), sluggish inputs and unhelpful quest log make all the juicy bits of Plurarlys feel locked behind a wall of mundanity.
A weirdly prevalent comparison that comes to mind is spamming L1 to switch weapon forms in Bloodborne when backtracking for items or shortcuts. Or, alternatively, casting Muffle as you explore Skyrim just to level magic while you travel. Obviously Plurarlys is nothing like those games, but there’s something so primal about having something to do, to fiddle about with, to keep us occupied while we travel that makes that travel so much more bearable.
Games like A Night in the Woods can have you retread areas and backtrack to quest-givers because platforming, jumping and generally having some traversal mechanics at all make that journey still feel engaging. In Plurarlys, there’s nothing to do, see or fiddle with while you’re trudging around. Even the hidden items, that can only be seen when in pager mode, you can’t scan for as you run through town. To activate the pager you have to hold q, and then once in pager mode Elie can’t walk and the screen is locked in place. So, scanning a whole map has to be done one screen at a time, with a slow hold input and fancy animation every…single…time.
Clever writing and an inspired world I wish I could have enjoyed more
There are so many memorable moments in Pluralys, but I’ll also never forget the hours (literal hours) spent just walking back and forth. Even with auto-run enabled (Which is hilariously “Not recommended” in the options menu) I just had too much down-time to feel truly engrossed. When a quest unexpectedly reacted to my choices, or hit a note I didn’t think the game was brave enough to go for (Themes like slavery, sleeper agents, dark magic, betrayal for a greater good) I did feel genuine surprise, genuine engagement. It’s just unfortunate that this was always followed by some other way the game felt like it was pushing me away — maybe I had to enter and exit pager mode a bunch, maybe I had to backtrack five areas, maybe the quest log says “Find Zui to leave!” after I come back to the game with no indication where Zui might actually be waiting for me in these huge, sprawling maps…
If you can stomach the flaws, there’s a lot of worthwhile content in Pluralys. The developer had already added some QoL changes from the demo, and so potentially the future will make the game feel more like a game and less like a chore. I’d love a chance to replay it and not be bludgeoned by tedium every few minutes, so that I could fully immerse myself in these innovative storylines and soak in those ominous, ever-present notes of something darker…just beneath the surface.
Pluralys is available on Steam
