Recompile – Spotlight

Recompile might be one of the most stunning games I played this year. It’s a fast paced platforming shooter set inside a digitized mainframe. All the terms and interface is made to look like you’re inside a PC. Imagine Cyberpunk pushed all the way to the max until there’s no punk left and it’s all Cyber. You’re a semi-sapient program trying to avoid deletion.

You start off with a few basic skills like jump, dash, and shoot, but then go on to acquire many more along the metroidvania journey. All throughout you come across fire walls, rogue programs, gates, switches, and so on. The controls are really tight making the combat feels pixel perfect. It also helps that the visuals are stellar with a tron-like look to everything.

Mixing abilities, solving environmental puzzles, traversing platforms, and taking down enemies all comes together to form a really compelling experience. It is challenging by design, especially combat encounters on narrow platforms, but the overall design demands environmental awareness, and I am all for it.

Pros:
Looks awesome
Great combat
Excellent level design
Interesting setting

Cons:
Some unbalanced checkpoints

Score – 9/10

About:

Witness the birth of sapient AI in this sprawling atmospheric hacking adventure.
Combining Metroidvania progression with non-linear exploration and gameplay. Recompile challenges players to explore, fight, hack, and survive. Discover the many secrets beneath ancient digital landscape and prepare for system-wide reconfiguration.

The game’s entire narrative takes place within 1 second of real time.

Delve into the ancient, sprawling ruins of the Mainframe and discover a range of traversal abilities to help you on your journey towards attaining true sapience.

The game has multiple endings based on the players actions; you can repair systems, restore lost data, hack or destroy enemies, all whilst uncovering the truth about the Hypervisor and the original purpose of the Mainframe.

The inhabitants of the Mainframe are strange and diverse, and many are found to be inherently hostile. A full complement of powerful weapons and abilities are available to help you survive, defend and destroy.

Logic gates can be freely inverted (and reverted), allowing puzzles or other threatening obstacles to be peacefully and safely bypassed. Even the inhabitants themselves can be tampered with, their programming changed to follow the player’s commands.

Life and death. Chaos and determinism. Sentience and sapience. Intelligence exists in many forms. In this dying world, one must explore all possibilities. Observe and respect all perspectives. Only then, can we truly survive.