Game: Tyd wag vir Niemand
Genre: Adventure, Platformer, Puzzle
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Steam)
Developer|Publisher: Skobbejak Games
Age Rating: EU 12+|
Price: $9.99 / £7.99 / € 8,99
Release Date: 20 September 2019
Review code used, with many thanks to Skobbejak Games!
Don’t Know How To Feel…
I am entering this review with difficulty. Mostly because I see so much potential in this game and its idea. Unfortunately, I feel, the execution of the actual gameplay part of the game was not done successfully.
I will describe my experience with Tyd wag vir Niemand in two words: “Unnecessarily frustrating”.
Here’s the thing though. I really, really WANTED to like this game. The artwork made me feel like I was wandering around in a Salvador Dali or René Magritte surrealist painting.
The spinning buildings and clocks, gigantic metal balls speeding dangerously around a serene fountain, a very random boat floating in the air while I’m in another boat that’s regularly floating on the available water, visually it is a delightful juxtaposition of unexpected objects hurling around several picturesque locations.
I consider myself a somewhat learned art appreciator; I studied art – technique and history – in university as my minor, so when my character was dropped into the first puzzle area my heart lifted as I took in the funky, surreal, uncanny atmosphere around me.
Sadly, that’s mostly where my enjoyment ended.
A Story Amidst All This Random-ness
So the story begins with you being dropped on what appears to be a blustery, snow-covered mountain.
Suddenly, you are paged by HQ. They tell you to infiltrate the pyramid and locate the team that they’ve lost contact with, and under no circumstances are you to touch “the machine”.
Pretty simple premise. You walk a few paces, and the game fades you into the pyramid – right in front of the machine – no one is around and now HQ is no longer responding to your calls.
Whoopsies! You touch something and this “machine” starts going haywire.
Welcome to Tyd wag vir Niemand.
Just TRY To Control Me!
One thing I liked about the control scheme was the fact that I didn’t have to search through three menus to find the option to invert my Y-axis (yes, I am one of those dirty inverts, and proud of it!). A simple press of the ‘-’ button, and you can easily flip between inverted and non-inverted camera control.
Side bar: it is a pet peeve of mine that I always have to shimmy through a bunch of options and menus to do this before I can ever start a game.
To continue: the game is in the first person perspective; the kind of first person perspective where you feel like you might just be a floating head on an invisible body. Not that that’s bothersome or anything, but when you look down at the ground you will not be seeing your character’s feet. Sometimes this can make it a bit difficult to see just how dangerously you may be standing on the edge of a platform.
The B button will allow you to jump; and sometimes it would feel like I was jumping high, and other times it would feel like I was jumping very low and slow. I tried really SMOOSHING the B-button in harder to see if that had an effect on the jumping, but nope, it feels completely random.
Now perhaps it has something to do with the game’s time power mechanic…?
By pressing the R-trigger, you will slow time; then pressing the L-trigger will return time to it’s regular speed. After bumbling around for what felt like a long time, I THINK I kind of understand why it feels like some of the things (like jumping and running) don’t work like they should:
When you are in slow-mo, it seems you are incapable of running; similarly when you are in slow-mo, the jumps don’t seem as effective (high/fast). None of this is explained in the game at all, so this is just me making an educated guess based on how the character moves in the game, so don’t quote me. Either that, or just sometimes your character is feeling a bit sluggish and in need of naps, because the walking speed is never affected.
The time power works strangely too. SOME of the things seem to carry their momentum – as in, if you put the game into slo-mo as an object is moving one direction, it will kind of speed up its movement in that direction once you go back to regular speed. BUT this seems to be the case for only SOME objects, which makes the game mechanic – and the game itself – unnecessarily frustrating!
I think one thing they could have added would be the ability to control how fast your character walks. It’s a standard kind of thing in most games these days; for example: in Breath of the Wild, if you tilt the joy-stick very slightly, Link will walk very slowly.
That’s not the case here. Your character only has one speed: LUDICROUS SPEED! (Just kidding, that’s a little Spaceballs reference). BUT, you only have “speed-walking-speed” when you move the joy-stick, or you can hold L (only in normal-time) and then you can run. Many of my issues and niggles may have been avoidable, I think, if I had simply been able to use a feather-touch and make my character walk slowly and carefully.
Platforming Technique Level Down
WHEW! This game activated my shouting and potty mouth; I haven’t yelled in frustration like I did at this game in a long time.
Mmmm… maybe since Super Ghouls’n Ghosts? Every fighting game I’ve ever played? (Fighting games just bring out the demons in me).
Seriously though! After falling at the SAME spot over and over, my “REE” factor was over nine thousand!
This game literally made my hands sweat! I am not a sweaty person! After each attempt, and then fall-fail, I would have to wipe my moist hands on my pants. It was actually a new experience for me.
The learning curve in this game goes from zero to one hundred with no inbetween. One second you’re simply pushing forward on the joy-stick to walk over a huge mountain landscape, and the next second you have to move and jump from moving and twisting toothpick sized pipe to the next pipe!
Where was the level in-between to ease me into this?! REE!
Unnecessary and – you guessed it – frustrating!
I Dare You To Make Less Sense
The puzzles! They just made no sense sometimes. In the second level there are these rings of fire on certain platforms. The first few I found, I jumped through (to my death incidentally), but it would trigger the flame to move and activate the dormant platform to get where I needed to go. Super random, slightly frustrating, but okay I can deal with it.
Then, for no reason, with no indication that the puzzle has changed, suddenly me jumping through to my death no longer works. I ran around trying to figure this out until I finally noticed that when I was looking directly at the flame it was making my SFX do a strange noise.
OOOOH, so I had to slow down time, STARE at the moving flame PERFECTLY for a certain amount of seconds, and THEN it will activate?!? Why didn’t you say so in the first place?! For the record – so unnecessarily frustrating was the fact that even in slo-mo the flame is moving quickly enough that it’s quite difficult to stare directly at it for the right amount of time without it constantly resetting the puzzle.
The time powers are also a bit too random for me. When you click into slo-mo, you will hear a ticking sound that will steadily get faster as you run out of time; but there’s no punishment for using the time power. You can just quickly press ZL and ZR again and instantly restart your slo-mo timer; it begs the question: why is there a timer in the first place?
Eye Spy With My Little I
The visual design of this game is so interesting and fun; this is why I had such a hard time writing this review. I WANTED to like it so bad.
I don’t know if anyone ever watched the old “Ghostbusters” cartoon? Anyone? Well, if you did, there was this episode – the only episode I really actually remember – where Peter Venkman’s character gets sucked into the Salvador Dali painting “The Persistence of Memory”. I LOVED this episode, the clocks were all melting on him, and it was weird and trippy, and I was so afraid for him because he was my favourite character and I was worried he was going to get trapped in the painting forever! Ahh! Not Peter!
THAT was the vibe I had when I landed in the first level of this game, and I was screenshotting my Switch all over the place and feeling lovely nostalgia and my art appreciation strings were being lovingly plucked.
That’s why the actual gameplay, controls, and mechanics of the game are so disappointing for me.
The music was excellent! I enjoyed the nice ambient background tracks for each puzzle a lot, but found myself always a bit too frustrated to really appreciate it.
Final Verdict
I think with some patching this could be a very cool and interesting game (I dunno, do patches work that way?). Give me the feather-touch-walking ability, and I’ll consider giving it another go.
I loved the art, and actually DO hope they consider some fixes to the gameplay and control mechanics. Because who wouldn’t want the chance to – in a way – walk through the mind of Salvador Dali?