Future Fragments is a really strange game. It presents itself as a metroidvania with multiple branching storylines and levels interconnecting with each other, but doesn't operate like one. For the most part, FF functions more like the old collectathons one could find in the PS1-PS2 eras, with levels composed of several paths isolated from their neighbours, with key collectables at the end of each that unlock the final boss area. The game also has a stronger emphasis on platforming, rather than combat; the content is a good mix of both, but clearly more thought has been but in the level design rather than the combat mechanics. (Not that I find the level design here particularily good, but we'll get to that.)
In general, the main character, Talia, feels pretty alright to control, even on a keyboard, which is what I used. She's easy to control and responsive, only bogged down by the shoddy hitboxes on some enemies and tiles that crop up from time to time. Unfortunately, she's doesn't have a very involved moveset; she can only move, jump, shoot in a straight line, and use some powerups you unlock after beating the final boss of each level. She can also gain passive attributes from collectables you get from the game; and while some have nice benefits to them, most of them don't vary up the gameplay that much. Some of them either have mediocre effects, or are just objectively better or worse versions of other passives.
For example, there are some passives that heal you, or deal more damage, or increase your movement speed, and those are just different variants of the same passive. You will equip only three of them very early on, maybe switch to a more defensive set if some enemies get tougher, then go back to the previous set and never look back again. The combat system is just too primitive to encourage a more dynamic swapping of buffs and resistances; granted, I played this game on easy mode, but the normal mode just boils down to more enemies with bigger healthbars that deal slightly more damage. The combat never really gets more challenging or involved, as Talia never really gets a complex moveset at any point.
And the actual moveset extensions Talia gets after beating the bosses don't change the gameplay much for the majority of the game. Unlike in metroidvanias where unlocking a new move would allow you to unlock new areas you couldn't get to before, here, the powerups are very sparsely used in very underwhelming ways; the game will ask you to use them at the start of each next level, then maybe twice of thrice to solve optional puzzles to get more collectables, some of those puzzles ranging from the insultingly simple, to the downright obnoxious (those who have played the lazer puzzle in the ice level know what I'm talking about).
As the levels become bigger and more complex as you play, the game will progressively ask you to use them more and more in more difficult ways, like freezing enemies to create temporary platforms, then immediately switch to the dash ability to close a wide gap.
The problem with this is, as the game never really encourages you to use them at first, you will very rarely encounter situations where you actually need them, meaning you will use them once or twice, and then forget they even exist, so when you reach a point in the level where you do actually need them, they will be the last solution to come to your mind to solve the issue at hand.
It doesn't help the fact that the game never goes out of its way to teach you how or when to use them; in itself, that's not necesarily a bad thing, as it lets the player more room to think for himself and find ways to be creative with his powers, but some situations are so opaque that it's difficult to understand what the game expects you to do.
I've lost quite a few minutes pacing back and forth throughout the entire factory and forest levels, trying to figure out how to get a specific item on a platform out of reach with just my powers alone. The answers to those puzzles were so obtuse they actually lowered my appreciation of the game by quite a bit. It also doesn't help that the controls, while fine for the most part, are really not adequate for some of the later platforming challenges involving using enemies as temporary platforms. Reaching the ceiling of that one room with the spiderbots you have to use as platforms was a pain in the ass and a half. Some enemies have obnoxious hitboxes and patterns; getting the helmet in the final level was an absolute nightmare. Thankfully, these moments are rare, but not being able to figure them out can lead to a very frustrating experience.
To go back to my analogy with the PS1 era games, it seems to me many of the issues I found within the game simply come from its age. This game was in development for a long time, and it seems to me most design decisions found in it made it age not as well as the devs thought. There are many game design decisions that were popular back in the mid 2010s that have become obsolete or are just downright considered bad nowadays. The level design, being one way-corridors, induce a lot of backtracking if you happen to miss some of the collectables on your way, that isn't simplified in any way by the powerups. Some traps in the levels are the same color as the environment, turning them into unavoidable cheap shots, and the forest level even has pitch-black rooms with fast and hard-hitting enemies in it that ask you to throw away any kind of precise platforming to just rush to the end or blindly blast at the enemy as soon as it enters your range.
Some rooms even have points of no return that ask you to keep moving forward or just die and respawn at the hub to restart the path all over again. The adult content is unlocked only on defeat or in specific cutscenes, discouraging actively looking for them as a single death sends you back to the hub, as each level only has a single save point at the start of the level, where it then branches out into many paths that get longer and longer as you progress through the game. The last levels are a absolute slog to go through, as they are hard enough to constantly ask for your attention and energy, yet never get challenging enough to be entertaining.
But the worst level, by far, is the end level, and this level tells me the developers stopped giving a fuck halfway through development. Every single negative aspect the previous levels had, this level increases tenfold. Where the previous levels got longer and longer, some of their path seven having mini-mazes in them, the entire final level is a giant maze. Not only has it twice as much rooms and branching paths as the other, but its gimmick is an alternate dimension you have to jump through to lock and unlock different pathways to retrive the Fragments that were stolen to you in the previous level.
Even worse, some of those rooms and alternate rooms have switches in it that activate or deactivate many platforms in the area, or even in a neighbouring node, so not only do you have to remember the path to each collectable and the hub, but you also have to remember which switch enables what, and if you screw up, you have to start that session all over again. Completing the first 4 levels took me roughtly 4 hours I would say, but this last level on his own surely took me more than four hours, not counting the shitty semi-final boss.
The worst thing is, this level has no reason to exist; for storytelling purposes, the devs wanted to shoehorn a last area when you hunt down the fragments you lost after spending four hours getting them all... And not only do I not understand that from a gameplay perspective, from a narrative perspective, this is dumb and brings nothing of value to the story apart from padding. You spent four fucking hours gathering those stupid McGuffins, only to get them stolen at the end of the game like it's a fucking Warner Bros cartoon. Genius writing. That is one case of amateurish writing we run into multiple more times throughout the game.
When I was playing the first two levels, I considered giving this game 4 stars, as it was a pretty alright experience with no major hiccups. By the time I reached the factory levels and cleared the forest level, I realized the entire game would be "gather X McGuffins to unlock a boss fight" with a different coat of paint on it, and I lowered it to 3 stars. After playing the final level, I lowered it to 2. It pained me to do this, but it's inexcusable to make your players go through the same shit four times in a row in progressively longer and longer levels with tedious puzzles and boring combats, only to give them a final level that boils down to a slap in the face. Ironically, this is the level that uses the character's abilities the most effectively, and it is the worst level by far.
There's also quite a few bugs that crop up here and there. The sound settings do not work half the time, and the game seems to play its audio on a different channel than my earplugs, playing it on the PC instead. The save points can also mute the sound for no reason, forcing you to restart the game to get it back. Getting at the end of a path after already completing it can sometimes softlock you by sending you back to the previous screen rather than the hub. I think that kind of bugs was the main reason the devs added a suicide option to get back to the hub faster.
But apart from those, Future Fragments feels, overall, quite polished. There a suprising good use of sound design thoughout the game, and the music is actually pretty good. The tracks are more atmospheric than memorable, but I did go out of my way to stop in some levels for a minute just to enjoy the soundtrack. It was pretty good.
This game, for some reason, was the only game I recently played where I didn't mute anything while playing, even the dialogues, even though I'm not a native English speaker and don't give the slightest fuck about dubbing in porn games. Overall, all the systems and gameplay mechanics were functional and worked together relatively well without detracting from each other, which I was pleasantly surprised by, given this game's turbulent history.
The artstyle too is very polished, with a good use of distinct color palettes for each level and gorgeous character designs and sex scenes. It never gets distracting to the point of making the levels confusing, but they did feel monotonous and overly repetitive, notably due in part to the blocky level design, but also the agressive reuse of background assets. Almost any given path of a level shares the same background assets as any other path, and the forest level, described as a dangerous zone by other characters, just looks like any average forest in any other videogame.
If I had to complain about the pixel art, it would be because, while good-looking and detailed, it also is a bit bland-looking, with uninspired designs for the environments and the enemies. I was disappointed to see the devs never used the environment of their levels as a way to introduce background storytelling into their game, given their focus on making a story-driven game first and foremost.
Which brings us to the actual story of the game, and the way it's conveyed. And of course, I have to talk about the databanks. And again, this is another example of what I said about this game using obsolete mechanics from an older time, as that kind of storytelling was very popular in the early 2010s, where the games just dumped optional walls of text though notes, books and whatnot (or in this case, databanks), dumping lore and story elements in a condensed way to the player to avoid taking him out of the game too much with unskippable cutscenes. I understand why the devs went this way. Unfortunately, they did it in the worst way possible.
The first issue with the databanks, is that their purpose for existing is pointless. The game already heavily relies in unskippable cutscenes for every single tiny step of the game, especially early on in the first level of the game, where Talia will constantly stop every two seconds to start a lengthy, poorly dubbed cutscene about every tutorial mechanic, every plot point justifying mving forward, and every goal the player has to reach in the current level he's in.
The worst part is, not only do they make databanks moot, those cutscenes are also used in contexts where nothing of value is presented to the layer in terms of story progression, character development, or even teaching new mechanics. Some cutscenes are just banter between characters, asking for annoying sidequests, or just here to tell lame jokes. Some of those cutscenes could be easily cut out of the game without any important plot point being impacted.
For instance, in the factory level, you can run into a robot that is pissed you apparently caused his entire linup to be decommissioned, and so as revenge, threatens to blow up and kill you, destroying your fragments in the process. What could potentially lead to an interesting chase sequence afterwards, is compeletely cancelled by Vie teleporting the robot out of the facility, letting him implode without any harm and Talia resuming her quest.
And my question is: What did this scene bring to the game? It didn't increase any of my character's stats, the play didn't learn about any specific plot point, there was no interesting lore added, it didn't affect the rest of the level, it didn't change anything about how the characters interacted with one another, and the jokes it delivered were absolutely not funny (if there were any joke to begin with, in which case the devs are terrible comedians). This cutscene was useless, plain and simple. And cutscenes like that appear all the time FF, whether it is from NPCs offering side quests or just chatting with Talia, or even between the main characters themselves. So much fat they could have trimmed down from the game, and they just didn't.
The second issue regarding the databanks, is how many of them there are, and how little of them actually bring something relevant to the plot or the worldbuilding. In some rooms, you could find up to four or five of these databanks, where they all could have been condensed into a single one or outright removed. And most of the time, given how this game lets you explore different paths at any given moment, you can very easily get databanks that talk about the same event, but not in the correct order, meaning you get a poorly stitched storyline that makes absolutely no sense and is easily diluted by the next databank which tells a completely different story that has no link whatsoever to the previous one, or even the relevant plot point that's happening right now in the story.
I tried, I genuinely, really tried to memorize as many names, locations and events as possible, but the game just dumps so many of them, so frequently, that is it just physically impossible to remember everything, even on multipe playthroughs. What the fuck is the Revenge? The Decline? Who the fuck is that Seeber I keep seeing in the golden databanks? He's the leader of the rebels, but what do they fight for or against? Some details are made clear enough as they are repeated often enough to stick to you, but most of the time, you just don't give a shit about what happened or what's happening, because it is simply impossible to care about so many characters. The only NPC that left a mark on me was an enemy soldier that sacrificed his life to save his squad, and respawned on a save pod with ten years of his life missing. That almost got something out of me, but it was too little, too late.
The way this game conveys its story is the least organic way the devs could have gone with it. The cutscenes marginally help, but you will mostly just skip them or read them fast enough that the voice acting can't keep up, meaning that the main focus of the devs' efforts, the voice acting, will be completely ignored by the vast majority of players. Just writing this makes me wonder if the devs actually ran playtesting sessions themselves or with other players, because in my eyes, it's clear as fuck they didn't.
And what's funny is, due to the game being unfinished, the final areas of the forest and end levels have their cutscenes with the characters pacing around and doing their motions as if they were talking, but with no voice acting whatsoever. Sometimes, not even the text is displayed on screen, when the very next scene could be fully voiced and subbed. It's so strange to me, like, there could be at times important cutscenes that don't deliver some crucial info because of the lack of text and/or voice acting (like Talia apparently turning against her king for no reason, or Vie turning against Talia and becoming one of the most infuriating boss fights in this game, again for no reason), but in the very next scene, you could have either a fully-animated sex scene, or a series of short cutscenes one after another boiling down to Talia making lame jokes. Seriously, what were the devs' priorities when making this game?
Even if you do your part as a player and try to stay as involved in the story as possible, there are way to many issues that take you out of the experience almost immediately. After the ice level you will stop being immersed in the game and quickly find more entertaining to try to point out as many plot holes, inconsistences and irrelevant story details as possible, when you're not busy doing the same with the level design. The storytelling of this game is a disaster, never exploiting the strengths of this medium and doubling down on its worst aspects.
And even if the game just told its story upfront without any databank or bad cutscene, the story itself isn't even good to begin with. You're sent to the future to retrieve a weapon to protect your kingdom. You meet Vie who guides you through the game, and rarely encounter Faye who's just here to taunt you in one screen only to be sexually humiliated in the next one. That's it.
At no point do you have any meaningful character interaction between them, or with any NPC you meet; the best Talia will do is say "hey, I've read about you in a databank" and that gives you the opportunity to start their very short side-quest if you want to, or to anwser to a branching dialogue that only marginally changes your stats; stats that are barely used in the game, apart from powering some of your passives and determining what ending you will get.
Because yes, for some reason this game has multiple endings, and I didn't bother to get them all. From what I understood you need to reach a certain reputation with Faye and get a certain set of stats to get the best ending, which would require to replay the game many, many times to find the correct choices and get the best endings.
And, sorry but no. The game isn't enjoyable enough for me to do that. At its best, the game never gets very good, just some okay-ish platforming with forgettable combat and mediocre sex scenes; at its worst, it's a slow, tedious, slog with a nonsensical story, obnoxious puzzles and final level, and a final bos fight that plays nothing like the rest of the game and boils down to QTEs. So after all that, the game ends with what is essentially the worst way they could have gone with for the final boss.
The only thing left for me to talk about is the adult content, what everyone came to this game for in the first place. And I'm gonna be honest, even though it's the most subjective part of this review, I found the sex scenes in this game to range from mediocre and forgettable, to downright repulsive at times. This has nothing to do with the artstyle, it's just that the devs have decided to go for the "ugly bastard", "rape" and "male monster/tentacles" fetishes that were popular back at the time of the game's inception (and are still popular today), but personnaly for me, very few of them are of the caliber I'd expect a game like this to have.
Only one or two of them are genuinely alluring I would say, and the rest is just ugly bastard after ugly bastard. And being rewarded with that kind of content after suffering through this game's issues for so long sure doesn't evoke an erection of arousal from me.
It doesn't help that very few of them are fully drawn, the rest being globs of pixels smashing into each other in the main level, and it doesn't help to see how little adult content there actually is in the game. The developers, of their own admission, wanted to make "more than a porn game", with gameplay and story being the focus of their efforts, while delegating the porn aspect to a side task.
The result was the porn rarely intermingling with the rest of the game, feeling very contrived and shoehorned when they do work together. The main plot never even once uses porn as a motivator or as a tool to move the story forward; the only time porn is somewhat used correctly is in the factory level when milk is used to powerup their machines... For some reason, because again, storytelling is this game is wack.
So in the end, it's a mess. The gameplay ranges from okay-ish to tedious, the level design from repetitive to abysmal, the puzzles from stupid to obnoxious, and the storytelling from bad to worse. The adult content, which should be the focus of that kind of game, is never in harmony with the story or the gameplay mechanics and is at times discouraged by them. The game looks nice, but is unfinished. It proposes neat ideas, but none are properly explored. Only one boss fight is remotely decent, with the rest being unecessarily annoying.
It is strange to see a game with this much effort put into it, so many years of development and so much advertisement by the lead developer end like this. In the end, we'll never know what really happened behind the scenes.
But what I will say is, I'm glad this game exists, even if it's a failure. You can very much feel the ambition with this one. This industry needs more dev teams experimenting and pushing the limits of what can be done with adult games, even if it results in failure. From what I recall, the devs were an inexperienced team and FF was their very first game, and even if some are dissapointed with the way the final product ended up to be, I'm really impressed with what they have done with their very first game, being their own engine, or the marketing, or everything else.
I'm really sick of porn games doing the bare minimum and playing the same cliches and fetishes to reach a broader audience. I don't want more games playing safe, I want more ambitious games like FF which, even if they are failures, show we can do more if we put our mind to it. That's why I don't really hate FF or even the dev team themselves, quite the contrary. I've found a newfound respect for them, as a creator and gamedev myself. Sure, I don't agree with most of their decisions, but the fact that they finally went through it all despite all the hardships in their way show they really believed in their project. Also, they finished a game. That's more than what I can say for the majority of adult devs out there.
