I guess I still had some leftover desire for cozy platformers after a Short Hike so here's Re:Fresh to fill that particular craving. First impressions of Re:Fresh weren't great, the game was clearly made on a limited budget with a team of seemingly 5 main developers. And whilst the cartoony art style and general simplicity goes a fairly long way, some assets, in particular the geometry of the cliff level just reek of amateurish "let me just use the basic terrain brush tool that comes with Unreal Engine's starter pack".
That aside I really found the game to be quite charming. Its essentially a low stakes collectathon : after a storm your home village (you being a humanoid robot in a town where robots and anthropomorphic animals coexist peacefully) has its infrastructure wrecked and you are tasked with helping the townsfolk the repair their homes and businesses via standard collectathon platforming. As you go you collect solar cells which give you extra jumps (yeah, you thought the A Short Hike comparison's were going to end with just the tone eh?) and dashes which you use to collect resources to complete quests.
The game is really short, like, an hour. Maybe longer if youre going for 100% completion. But honestly its sold for really cheap and its a small indie studio's first project so I don't mind giving them my money.
The more interesting thing to talk about is the setting, however. I had heard of the term "Solarpunk" before but I think this is the first piece of media Ive interacted with that really subscribed to it. Now, take everything I'm saying here with a pinch of salt cause pretty much my entire knowledge of this is based purely on reading the wikipedia page for Solarpunk lmao. In fact, let me just link it here so you too can read it at your leisure. Its a relatively recent movement in speculative fiction that is focused on an optimistic sustainable future as opposed to the usual, more realistic dystopian hellhole we are currently en route to becoming in the next couple of decades, sooner if you life in the third world.
Now, on the one hand its easy to be cynical about both the society envisioned by the game and the solarpunk movement as a whole : communal subsistence farms and solar based sustainable development is great and all but how much of that is possible in a planet of 8 billion? Before the industrial revolution and enclosure the population of earth didnt even reach 1 Billion. Yes, most economic activity in the current day goes towards making profit for shareholders and ever increasing economic growth based on exploitation of resources and labour (mainly from the third world by the first) but mass industrialised agriculture is really the only way to support the current population of earth, afaik. There is also something to be said about how these sorts of optimistic, wishful views of the future can distract from what we really should be doing, i.e fighting tooth and nail to avert or at the very least mitigate the coming climate disaster.
With that said, I also acknowledge that Re:Fresh isnt ill intentioned, it is at the end of the day just a videogame and the fate of our planet rests on a hell of a lot more than whatever impact a budget platformer will or even can have. And honestly, an optimistic view of the future beyond capitalism and the overexploitation of nature is kind of radical, so I can't get too mad. Godspeed Re:Fresh!
That aside I really found the game to be quite charming. Its essentially a low stakes collectathon : after a storm your home village (you being a humanoid robot in a town where robots and anthropomorphic animals coexist peacefully) has its infrastructure wrecked and you are tasked with helping the townsfolk the repair their homes and businesses via standard collectathon platforming. As you go you collect solar cells which give you extra jumps (yeah, you thought the A Short Hike comparison's were going to end with just the tone eh?) and dashes which you use to collect resources to complete quests.
The game is really short, like, an hour. Maybe longer if youre going for 100% completion. But honestly its sold for really cheap and its a small indie studio's first project so I don't mind giving them my money.
The more interesting thing to talk about is the setting, however. I had heard of the term "Solarpunk" before but I think this is the first piece of media Ive interacted with that really subscribed to it. Now, take everything I'm saying here with a pinch of salt cause pretty much my entire knowledge of this is based purely on reading the wikipedia page for Solarpunk lmao. In fact, let me just link it here so you too can read it at your leisure. Its a relatively recent movement in speculative fiction that is focused on an optimistic sustainable future as opposed to the usual, more realistic dystopian hellhole we are currently en route to becoming in the next couple of decades, sooner if you life in the third world.
Now, on the one hand its easy to be cynical about both the society envisioned by the game and the solarpunk movement as a whole : communal subsistence farms and solar based sustainable development is great and all but how much of that is possible in a planet of 8 billion? Before the industrial revolution and enclosure the population of earth didnt even reach 1 Billion. Yes, most economic activity in the current day goes towards making profit for shareholders and ever increasing economic growth based on exploitation of resources and labour (mainly from the third world by the first) but mass industrialised agriculture is really the only way to support the current population of earth, afaik. There is also something to be said about how these sorts of optimistic, wishful views of the future can distract from what we really should be doing, i.e fighting tooth and nail to avert or at the very least mitigate the coming climate disaster.
With that said, I also acknowledge that Re:Fresh isnt ill intentioned, it is at the end of the day just a videogame and the fate of our planet rests on a hell of a lot more than whatever impact a budget platformer will or even can have. And honestly, an optimistic view of the future beyond capitalism and the overexploitation of nature is kind of radical, so I can't get too mad. Godspeed Re:Fresh!