Recompile (Xbox Series X)
There have been many creative ways fiction has depicted the rather unromantic act of hacking computer code, Recompile choosing to take an interesting approach where the program being injected into a computer system manifests as a humanoid figure that needs to leap around and fight as its representation of cracking and altering the code. However, while this abstraction of the process does still meld in a good deal of code and retro computer displays for its aesthetic, it also seemingly misrepresents itself, Recompile almost unsure if the action you’re witnessing is unfolding as depicted or not.
The setup for Recompile withholds some vital information but has an individual named Janus inserting a program of their own invention into a computer system they are attempting to reboot and rehabilitate. While the initial details are sparse, early on you learn the system you’ve been inserted to housed the Hypervisor, an AI that helped with the functions of a base where a group of top scientists were working together on a project meant to test and develop systems for sustainable life on other planets. Depending on where you are in the mainframe you’ll be working on reactivating the systems that went down after some unknown issue took the Hypervisor and its systems offline, and here is where we hit one of the game’s problems with knowing what it is. Its page on digital stores claims the entire process of investigating and fixing the system takes place across one second in real life, a program naturally able to perform tasks far faster than a human. However, even if we accept the program’s work is an abstraction that only appears to be a few hours long thanks to it being adjusted for our human perception, there are times that Janus will send messages to the program as it works that make it clear more time is passing. This 1 second claim does come from outside the game though as does the weird assertion the program you play as gradually begins to develop some form of sapience when the fact it remains a rather faceless participant in this work actually ends up being one of the elements of the story that makes it more unique.
Hypervisor itself is not some rogue AI that did some predictable takeover of the mainframe, but as you explore the inside of the machine and start uncovering logs recorded from humans interacting with the supervising program, you do begin to see a fairly compelling portrayal of a machine developing some facsimile of a personality. Each different system you work to restore was tied to one of the scientists involved in the project and reading their logs actually helps them stand out as individual characters, but they all interact with Hypervisor in different ways that start to push it beyond its intended purpose of simply managing the facility’s systems. The alterations to its code by needing to interact with the humans and their shifting demands don’t lead to it just becoming another human in the way it behaves, it clearly has the hallmarks of an artificial intelligence in how its thoughts are connected together and it’s not clear how much of its emerging personality is through imitation, error, or an authentic emergence of true sentience. The game leaves some important questions hanging in the air but also does a good job of building up the Hypervisor as something sympathetic regardless of whether you believe it achieved some higher level of thought, partly because of how those scientists chose to interact with it and treat it. Some foist responsibilities on it that clearly strain it, others try to foster its social development, and the growing troubles that press in on the facility from outside sources begin to necessitate it behaving in ways it wasn’t designed to handle but must anyway. Because your program is an impartial observer it doesn’t distract from this quietly emerging examination of the Hypervisor and the humans it assisted, the delicate but perceptible progression through this plot ending up being Recompile’s highlight despite the false promises that appear in its sales pitch.
Collecting all the data logs that reveal this story is clearly the intended way of playing Recompile and if you don’t collect them all before the finale you’ll get some pretty poor endings that don’t really follow through on Hypervisor’s character growth, although they do work fine as curiosities to pursue after you get the true satisfying conclusion for grabbing all the logs. Grabbing the logs isn’t something the game directs you towards with the level design, a good deal involving pursuing side paths to grab the geometric projection that contains them, but Recompile’s levels often value having a large space for you to explore and one where progress isn’t always a clear path. The player finds the different important systems of the mainframe like security and life support represented by spaces that effectively feel artificial and beyond normal ideas of a functional layout. These areas rarely try to look like anything specific, there usually being some sort of dominant color to the area’s lighting but you’ll be hopping around glitched platforms and navigating around large structures of unclear purpose. There’s not often a clear justification for why things look the way they do, be it large clear pipes carrying green energy or splinters of black floating through the air. Some areas like security do have a large stretch of damaging red energy that evokes lava and could be said to be part of the system’s defenses against intruders like you, but the locations feel quite abstract and while they sometimes evoke living things like plants and mushrooms, it also doesn’t feel like you’re in a real space so much as some odd technological ruin you’ll need to explore to find the systems you can engage with.
The way you engage with Recompile’s world is very poor though. Most of the game boils down to platforming around these spaces that don’t really add navigational challenges to the process. Instead, your limited movement is often the trial you’re overcoming, the game taking a while to give you the tools that make its often sprawling and heavily vertical locations more navigable. Beginning with a jump and acquiring a dash that gives you some extra aerial maneuverability, a fair amount of time is spent with these two options when fall damage is easy to trigger despite the heights you’ll be climbing and the platform spacing is often meant to strain your movement abilities without making it interesting. Long periods of the game can boil down to slowly taking hops from one floating platform to another with a jump that isn’t the easiest to guide in the air, and if you fall and there isn’t ground below, you can instead be waiting quite a while for your inevitable death. Respawning is usually not too damaging to your health but the checkpoints are oddly placed, some marked and others existing without any clue you’ll appear there beforehand, but with how many times you must perform conceptually simple but difficult to control jumps in a row, being set back at all just ends up more frustrating.
Despite platforming being the game’s main form of play it is also poorly handled with few legitimate challenges to it. You’re mostly trying to get your imprecise leaps to actually land on the small stretches of land you’re trying to reach, but eventually you do start to get new abilities like additional jumps that gradually peel back the difficulty of level navigation some. You’ll still spend a good deal of time dealing with just hopping from one platform to the next even with the new skills, but you can start to exploit the fact that every part of the unusual architecture you’re dealing with is often solid, meaning sometimes you can invent your own ways to skip the tedium by finding a small ledge to leap to or breaking your fall with a midair jump so you can better explore areas lower than you rather than executing a bland descent to that space. The unfortunate truth about the movement is that as you get more skills to better perform it and explore the game’s areas, you aren’t often enjoying your new options so much as enjoying the fact that they’ve removing the more annoying aspects of getting around. The platforming isn’t opposed properly do to how the game handles hazards and enemies, the challenge often just about landing where you need to land, so once you can better move about, you’re just going to try and skip around and get what you need to progress.
The enemies in Recompile are handled with a poorly designed third-person shooting approach. Little flying machines will appear at times and start peppering you with shots, their shots often incredibly accurate but usually the damage they can deal will be offset by the fact that killing them restores enough of your health. However, when you pull up your gun to fire on them, the shooting is fairly awful. Enemies move around the air freely and quickly and lining up your shot is slow and difficult while your own movement has suddenly become heavily limited. You can’t jump while having your gun out since you tuck into a ball when you leap, your walking has become far slower, and the dash that serves as a dodge requires you to put the gun down to activate. Thus, you become a horrendously slow target for your capable foes to pepper with their shots while you struggle to land your own. Upgrades do the same thing to the combat that they do the platforming though, although its even more appreciated here. You get the ability to slow down time that can be activated any time and has no cost or limit, meaning the moment an enemy flies into view, you can pop on this power and actually have time to set up your shots. You get a range of weapons as you explore and eventually you get some strong enough that any time a basic baddie appears you can slow down time, shoot them down quickly, and then move along. However, this means that most any enemy encounter is a nuisance no matter how it unfolds, since they don’t work well when they’re challenging and when you have the right counter for them, they’re inconsequential.
Bosses take things in a harsher direction unfortunately, as they can eat a lot of punishment before going down while packing things like instant kill attacks that can be well aimed and hard to dodge if you try and face the enemy legitimately. They look nifty, some like a pyramid made of smaller robots shifting around in interesting ways and unleashing flamethrowers from its many eyes, but the actual skirmish is going to either necessitate the slowdown power or be a gamble since your attack and movement options aren’t fit for the kind of quick and deadly fights these bosses present, but they are at least few in number so you don’t need to deal with them often. We are reaching the issue where there’s no real activity you are happy to engage with beyond reading the plot, but there are a few minor puzzles along the way, often involving pressing buttons to send power through winding wires. These circuits have certain rules they abide by that determines if they receive power properly and you often need to enable all of the present lamps to power something like a lift. These can sometimes be easy to bumble into working by just pressing buttons and when they do bar that approach better, it’s still not too much of a logic test since they’re rarely intricate. Looking around for the buttons to press at least guides some of the exploration at times and these don’t really land in that rough spot the battle system finds itself in, but these aren’t a strong enough distraction to help redeem the experience nor are they particularly prevalent either. Recompile instead focuses most on the platforming to the point that the hack ability that it introduces as a way to bypass puzzles for a price barely feels necessary or much of a burden if you do pay it while the enemies that can be hacked to help you don’t really provide much aid since most combat will be invalidated by the time you are granted this power.
THE VERDICT: An exceptionally well-written take on a developing technological mind through the believable portrayal of Hypervisor is buried beneath so many poor design decisions that it weakens whatever enjoyment there is to find in Recompile. The platforming starts off rough to control and it is mostly tested with tiny platforms you must jump precisely too despite your weak maneuverability, and when you do get more skills to move around it either invalidates whatever challenge there was or just leads to more boring hopping across tiny platforms that are spaced out a bit more. Battle is almost always a bother because pulling out your weapon makes you slow against fast or powerful foes, but the ability to slow down time freely makes things mildly more acceptable because you can just invalidate every enemy encounter’s difficulty by activating it. With a few weak puzzles left to round out Recompile, this game fails in many departments and only really works when your powers start removing the uninteresting barriers to exploring and finding those data logs with that unfortunately buried tale of Hypervisor’s character growth.
And so, I giver Recompile for Xbox Series X…
A BAD rating. Remove the data logs from Recompile and it would absolutely crumble due to a lack of anything interesting. Its approach to environmental design is initially somewhat interesting due to its abstract appearance but even the color choices often lead to areas of extreme brightness or darkness. An unusual amount of focus is put on hopping around spaces that aren’t testing your abilities in entertaining ways, the jumping more about wrangling your program’s odd midair maneuverability to land on a very small stretch of land rather than more entertaining platforming challenges like weaving around hazards and foes or needing to get the timing down. An odd amount of focus on precision without granting you precise controls makes the simple act of navigating the spaces a chore and when you are granted the powers to simplify such movement, it’s not so those skills can be tested in novel ways but instead so that you can just speed up exploration or instead have to do two jumps to get to the next platform instead of one. If platforming was going to be the crux of the experience then proper tests of it should have been implemented, this game sometimes like a poor version of Blue Fire since while that game does give you growing movement options and a world with many solid landing spots that can help you skip around, it also knew how to challenge that movement with authentic danger and requirements beyond just whether or not you can even navigate properly. The shooting could have given Recompile a thrilling second side but the handling of its is remarkably poor, the unusual restrictions on your movement when the gun is out making any moment that actually tries to test you with a battle annoying since you’re clearly not given the tools you need to keep up with the opposition. Only that slow down effect really helps it become negligible most of the time, but this could have worked out as a nice action component if the battles were built around your limits or you were simply made more mobile and responsive when the weapon is out.
Recompile has an excellent story about artificial intelligence evolving to tell even if it says it’s telling a different story on its digital store pages, but that seems to capture the game’s problems with figuring itself out fairly well in the end. It bills itself as a Metroidvania where new abilities let you explore old areas but that hardly manifests beyond a data log or two that were out of reach, the new skills instead mostly eroding the awful design decisions in how battles and areas are laid out by letting you circumvent them. It is quite the testament to how this game handles its sci-fi narrative that it can help to mildly mitigate the many issues you’ll experience in trying to uncover it, but at the same time the fact the game’s progression is often defined by eliminating the problems without providing new challenges at least means if it does get its story hooks into you that you can eventually get better at experiencing it without as much obstruction. The process is still far too rough and annoying to get the game completely forgiven, but at least Recompile has something to give so it isn’t a total failure.