Indie games always come up with something we used to like or overlook with unique settings. It’s a reason I want to support their idea and share to the others. Distortion is a story-driven adventure developed by Brazilian team which caught my attention last year, not by graphics, but musical gameplay and settings.

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Distortion brings your adventure to unparalleled world. You play a girl wakes up in imaginary place who suffers from amnesia. The only way is to explore and fine fragment of memory from each place and journals. The world of Distortion lives up to its name. It’s surreal, mystery, and connects to event of girl’s past by real-world entities. Yet, it has breathtaking landscape from broken bridge to sky tower built around shaped stones.
As you advanced through the story, you will encounter giant masked creature that hold the secret of this world and the violin as the girl learns the power of music to shape up the world.

With powerful intro, the story becomes intriguing as the game lets player to learn backstory from environment and set of messages as piece of memories. It’s quite interesting and can be interpreted in different meanings even though it can be confusing at a time and lack of proper to explanation to some players. It still keeps me engaging from memorable scenes to the finale.

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The gameplay is involved around exploration, power-based puzzle, and chasing sequence. As musician, your main tool is old violin use for solving puzzle. You explore the area and gain access to power for unlocking another area. Using power is very simple, you equip violin and press/hold on correct note (Do, Re, Mi, Fa). Each power has fixed preset and effectiveness based on your play. It’s not hard and easy to master compared to most rhythm games. There are not much of power types due to simple design of puzzle and platforming. Moreover, you can also play freely or specific note to trigger story event.

You will later encounter shadow creatures. They will chase and attack you in certain area and chase sequence. It forces to use approach carefully for exit route and use noise power to avoid detection. Some can be bit tricky and require almost perfect timing where you need to use multiple powers to escape. Luckily, the checkpoints are forgiving, but don’t forget to manually save the progress in cave spot before quit the game.

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The sound designs are quite good and play accordingly to environment. For example; the gusts sound on high ground and indoor echo in water cave. In contrast, shadow creature sounds are terrified and disturbing in good way. There might be some big drop when the action affects various prop and environment and weird audio cut. The original soundtrack is very well composed. It’s charming, powerful, and motivated to keep the feel of wondering and travel despite of looping in long sequence.

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Although, Distortion has great visual design and interesting gameplay, but technical problems and flawed design can drive some people off. The problems are inconsistent and subjective that some might experience game-breaking bug or crash with certain action. It doesn’t happen in my playthrough, but visual and animation bugs can be visually annoying. For example, the game accidentally drop player during moving platform causes player stuck in loop animation or movement glitches due to geometry design and stiff animation. Transition between sequence (cutscene > third-person) can prevent player movement for few second, this becomes worse when you are in middle of chase sequence.

The game also lacks visual guidelines in some areas (especially where you encounter shadow creatures). With timing and lack option of defense, you are mostly overcame by swarm and blindly forced to do trial and error which is frustrating.

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I found the game run quite solid and optimized on my 7 years old hardware with max settings. The game uses dead engine called c4 Engine (probably personal build). It shows impressive render of terrain and keep details from far distance. Unfortunately, it has few frames drop in some area due to amount of additional effects, no option to tone down bloom, and many unpolished levels (floating foliage/trees).

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In my opinion, Distortion is not a bad game; it’s quite above an average adventure for 7-10 hours experience. It’s ambitious project with many interesting elements, but it requires more testing and polish. If you’re interested in surreal adventure game despite of design flaws, I could give this game a try as it rewards you with powerful consequence and idea about life.

If you found this review helpful, please consider and give a thumb up or feedback to improve my review

[h1][b]”Despite of design flaws, Distortion is unique ride of remembering and music”[/b][/h1] Indie games always come up with something we used to like or overlook with unique settings. It’s a reason I want to support their idea and share to the others. Distortion is a story-driven adventure developed by Brazilian team which caught my attention last year, not by graphics, but musical gameplay and settings. --------------------------------------------------------- [h1]Coexisting Worlds[/h1] Distortion brings your adventure to unparalleled world. You play a girl wakes up in imaginary place who suffers from amnesia. The only way is to explore and fine fragment of memory from each place and journals. The world of Distortion lives up to its name. It’s surreal, mystery, and connects to event of girl’s past by real-world entities. Yet, it has breathtaking landscape from broken bridge to sky tower built around shaped stones. As you advanced through the story, you will encounter giant masked creature that hold the secret of this world and the violin as the girl learns the power of music to shape up the world. With powerful intro, the story becomes intriguing as the game lets player to learn backstory from environment and set of messages as piece of memories. It’s quite interesting and can be interpreted in different meanings even though it can be confusing at a time and lack of proper to explanation to some players. It still keeps me engaging from memorable scenes to the finale. --------------------------------------------------------- [h1]Adventure of Lone Musician[/h1] The gameplay is involved around exploration, power-based puzzle, and chasing sequence. As musician, your main tool is old violin use for solving puzzle. You explore the area and gain access to power for unlocking another area. Using power is very simple, you equip violin and press/hold on correct note (Do, Re, Mi, Fa). Each power has fixed preset and effectiveness based on your play. It’s not hard and easy to master compared to most rhythm games. There are not much of power types due to simple design of puzzle and platforming. Moreover, you can also play freely or specific note to trigger story event. You will later encounter shadow creatures. They will chase and attack you in certain area and chase sequence. It forces to use approach carefully for exit route and use noise power to avoid detection. Some can be bit tricky and require almost perfect timing where you need to use multiple powers to escape. Luckily, the checkpoints are forgiving, but don’t forget to manually save the progress in cave spot before quit the game. --------------------------------------------------------- [h1]Shaped up by Melody[/h1] The sound designs are quite good and play accordingly to environment. For example; the gusts sound on high ground and indoor echo in water cave. In contrast, shadow creature sounds are terrified and disturbing in good way. There might be some big drop when the action affects various prop and environment and weird audio cut. The original soundtrack is very well composed. It’s charming, powerful, and motivated to keep the feel of wondering and travel despite of looping in long sequence. --------------------------------------------------------- [h1]Stumble in Gap of Darkness[/h1] Although, Distortion has great visual design and interesting gameplay, but technical problems and flawed design can drive some people off. The problems are inconsistent and subjective that some might experience game-breaking bug or crash with certain action. It doesn’t happen in my playthrough, but visual and animation bugs can be visually annoying. For example, the game accidentally drop player during moving platform causes player stuck in loop animation or movement glitches due to geometry design and stiff animation. Transition between sequence (cutscene > third-person) can prevent player movement for few second, this becomes worse when you are in middle of chase sequence. The game also lacks visual guidelines in some areas (especially where you encounter shadow creatures). With timing and lack option of defense, you are mostly overcame by swarm and blindly forced to do trial and error which is frustrating. --------------------------------------------------------- [h1]Performance[/h1] I found the game run quite solid and optimized on my 7 years old hardware with max settings. The game uses dead engine called c4 Engine (probably personal build). It shows impressive render of terrain and keep details from far distance. Unfortunately, it has few frames drop in some area due to amount of additional effects, no option to tone down bloom, and many unpolished levels (floating foliage/trees). --------------------------------------------------------- [h1]Verdict[/h1] In my opinion, Distortion is not a bad game; it’s quite above an average adventure for 7-10 hours experience. It’s ambitious project with many interesting elements, but it requires more testing and polish. If you’re interested in surreal adventure game despite of design flaws, I could give this game a try as it rewards you with powerful consequence and idea about life. [quote][i]If you found this review helpful, please consider and give a thumb up or feedback to improve my review[/i][/quote]