NORTH: A Heavy Story With Excellent Tone, but Inadequate Gameplay.

Outlands' NORTH has an interesting goal: to get across the emotion and confusion of a refugee in a strange land. The game gets its point across very quickly and that is to its credit. From its first moment, you feel like your in an alien world which constantly confounds and frustrates the player. When things start to look familiar, the game manages to add some uncanny element that keeps the setting odd and leaves you wanting to understand more. Its rare that a virtual world manages feel so unfamiliar.

That being said, I got pretty tired with the overall experience pretty quick. This could be interpreted as the creators accomplishing their goal, as the objective is to confound and confuse you. However, I felt the mechanics simply don't stand up to the story being told. The game feels poorly designed, and this distracts from the important themes of the game.

NORTH will confound you, but in the wrong way. The game mechanics boil down to, walk into a room, get information, read information and do exactly what the it says to progress. There is no self-discovery, no aha moments, at no point did I ever feel confusion at trying to understand instruction given to me an unfamiliar way. The game could perhaps have took some clues from older point and click adventures, which give almost no information and thrive on self-discovery through trial and error. This is not a new experience, and I think the game needed to ground itself a bit more in what has been done. Instead, the mechanics don't match the central themes of the game. You quickly discover that you can ignore anything that is confusing, as long as you simply walk everywhere and click on everything, the game will tell you exactly what you need to do.

The theme is there, the tone is there, the art style really worked for me. What was lacking was the game mechanics. I appreciate what the creators did, I think its very clever and the end hit home for me. However, the game play itself was not enough for me to consider it a good game. It feels like they needed to go through more iterations of design before calling it the final product. The game play feels like it is far below what is possible to do while maintaining the themes and emotions they were aiming for, even on a budget.