Gonna have to preface this by saying that if you haven't seen ReBoot or haven't seen the Woolie video on the series a lot of this will just read like ancient runes. I genuinely don't think I can imagine a world where a ReBoot game came out for the PSX, or any platform for that matter, and actually had good controls. Like I'm not even trying to slight the show by saying that or anything, but ReBoot just feels like the kind of show whose licensed game would maneuver like dogshit no matter what platform it came out on or what genre it's going for. This is a third-person shooter, a skate-boarding game, and a platforming game! A mummy cursed Mainframe sometime in the late 90's and it caused everyone at the studio to just make the wildest, weirdest decisions possible. This genre choice feels perfect. This is Peak Late ReBoot.

I'm actually unsure if the controls are like, slippery and cumbersome by design here. All the buttons are in reasonable places and do what you'd expect, but the way Bob moves around the environment is just insanely fickle. Every time you tap forward he skids a little bit and then slowly comes to a stop, and in order to jump you need to hold the button down for a little bit to make Bob enter his "crouch mode", which he can still shoot and move with complete freedom in. "Crouch mode" actually lets you bypass certain obstacles that I'm unsure if you're supposed to be able to avoid by just making yourself shorter so you can duck under them. Releasing the button will make Bob jump, but with a pretty noticeable delay. Closing "tears" is like, one of the three things you do in this game, and each one is on a time limit that'll return a game over if you can't mend it in time. When closing a tear Bob gets jerked around and pulled towards/away from the tear, and if he touches it he'll get blown back and take damage, and this is kind of why I think the controls being this loose and slippery may have actually been at least a little intentional- the primary challenge when doing the main objective of each mission comes from wrangling Bob around so he doesn't die or get blown off a cliff trying to close the tear. In a way it actually makes closing the tears a little engaging, but actually getting to them is an absolute nightmare because of how much platforming is always involved and how high the penalty is for falling away from wherever the tear was and having to maneuver your way back up. I will give the game this, however: the shooting actually feels fine. Your cursor highlights an enemy and you hold down the button until they're dead.

I think there's actually something to be said for the visuals of ReBoot PSX. Like yes it's dark and miserable and Bob looks like his face has been squished flat enough so that you could comfortably eat off of it but I do think it does kind of capture the vibe of some of the really early ReBoot episodes that like, took place primarily underground or indoors.

Also this is small but it's absolutely hilarious to me that the game expects you to fall out of bounds so often that every time this happens the screen goes black, Bob screams "GLITCH, GRAPPLE!" and you hear the sound of a grappling hook before being punted back wherever you were previously standing. This happened to me 3 times in like an hour of play and I wasn't trying to make it happen. Some walls and a few floors just don't have collision.

So the game plays horribly, but I can't give it less than two stars because it's horrible in a lot of weird, interesting ways that might be of interest if you're fascinated with the show like I am. I feel like a lot of its strangest elements really only become more surreal when you consider that it came out a couple of months after Season 3 ended- I'm not saying that it had to have taken place after that, but given a lot of the events that take place during ReBoot's big 'serious', continually narrative season, it feels like such a strange decision to set this before anything else in the series.

So like, what do I mean by that? To start with it's extremely weird that Bob, who had never really killed anyone in the first two seasons because of censorship given that this was, like, a show for 9 year olds- and who is later confirmed to just straight-up have a no-kill rule once the writers get enough freedom to include frequent on-screen death, elevating it to a show for 11 year olds- is flying around on his hoverboard gunning down citizens who have been turned viral with his trusty sub-machine gun. Every time he wipes a soul off this world by pumping them with 15 slugs a voice cheerfully announces "Enemy Destroyed!", their little cartoon bodies falling to the ground and staying inert until they're removed to make space for more assets to be loaded. I don't even think this is like "character assassination" or whatever it's just extremely funny. Like can you imagine if you're playing a game based on The Last Airbender and they just give Aang the ability to kill people with firebending. Plus like I said, this came out after Season 3!! Why not just make Matrix the player character his whole thing is being a blood psychopath who shoots people and if they had just done this I might have gotten the chance to see him blow Ray Tracer's brains onto the pavement for the crime of standing within the same census zone as his computer wife. On the plus side this does mean we got a line read from Michael David Donovan in his incredibly racist Phong voice where he screams "BOB! You must __not__ shoot the civilians!"

In addition to that, I think that the events of season 3, namely that there are major character deaths that people react to with dramatic displays of grief, makes the plot of this game just incredibly funny. Bob goes into the sewers to stop Megabyte's plans and when he comes out Phong rolls up and is like "you saved the city! But little Enzo was killed in the ensuing blast :(" and Dot just frowns in the most everyday, unaffected way possible. Like she is exactly as upset about her little brother dying violently as I would be if forgot my wallet at home and had to drive back to get it. Phong then suggests sending Bob back in time to save Enzo and Dot is like "no wait Bob don't do it! What if you die in the process? Saving Enzo isn't worth it! :(" which is maybe the most hilarious sentiment you could possibly have Dot express after "I couldn't cope if my little brother died" is like, kind of her whole thing in season 3. Just, very surreal!

I absolutely choose to believe that everything that happens in this game is ReBoot cannon. I want to believe that Phong can just send people back in time but like, forgot to all the times someone either dies or is incapacitated later on in the show. You'd think his power to do this would come up again! And like, once again, this was written and developed, I would assume, during the season where Phong having time travel powers would actually have been game-changing!

This basically amounts to me just pointing and going "this game for Canadian 10 year olds uhhhhh doesn't really mesh with the thematic elements of this show for 10 Canadian 10 year olds B)" but I don't care I played this game as like, a bit to see what it was like and when it crashed after the fourth level it just left me with Many Thoughts. I can now say that I've written more about ReBoot for the PSX than I have for like, Pathologic. Sorry Ice-pick Lodge this is apparently the game that I find more interesting to discuss!

It's not finished, and I'm not even finished with it, but I genuinely don't think any other game has gotten me this excited at the sheer scale of my options when creating a character. On various runs I've played a teleporting gunslinger, an inventor who could channel electricity into his weapons, and a swordswoman who could phase in and out of reality at the cost of being hunted by a parallel version of herself. The frustration of each death (on classic mode, at least) is tempered by the fact that now you have another opportunity to explore whatever mutations, implants, skills and systems you haven't touched or paired together yet. It is a game that challenges you to take the character-building options it's given you and create new, stupid sci-fi OCs, all of whom get to exist in a wonderfully creative and colorful take on a post-apocalypse. It's obtuse and there are some very real balance issues, but I'm incredibly excited to venture deeper into its world and see how it all comes together.

Addendum: After playing this for 130 hours and having died over, and over, and over again, having seen much of the game even if some stones still are unturned, I think I really just have to give it to Freehold Games for deciding to create a longform open-world RPG that's engrossing and interesting instead of one that's like, reasonable. This is a game where your level 30 character will die in the last dungeon because a psychic cloned himself and each of his clones used Sunder Mind on you at the same time, and you know what? Cool. Awesome. I unironically love this shit give me more please

I'm actually kind of in two minds when it comes to this game. On one hand it's an absolute stylistic achievement; the way everything manages to appear fluid and expressive while also looking like the entire game was passed through the Game Boy Camera, the soundtrack which is at times catchy and other times genuinely kinda haunting, some interesting character designs, one specific moment of pretty effective horror, and a few decent gags all make this hard not to at least recommend giving a try, but like, on the other hand, it's surprising to me how difficult it was for me to stay interested during the four or so hours it took to play.

The game's appeal, for me at least, starts and ends at its aesthetic, and those aforementioned scattered moments of horror and decent humor. None of the five episodes here have especially interesting setups or satisfying payoffs, and I kind of feel like the game at times kind of suffers from not taking itself too seriously? Like man the episode where you start experiencing increasingly strange events while wandering through a desert could have been kind of unnerving and may have managed to draw me in if it wasn't also like "heh... and get THIS... your travel companion is FREAKIN' MC RIDE!!!!" Like I feel as if Monkey is the most effective and interesting chapter simply by virtue of the fact that it leans into the disturbing quality of some of the game's visuals and sound design without throwing in too many wacky, zany irreverent moments!!! That may just be me wanting something out of the game that it's not aiming for, though; for me, it's just difficult to get invested in the deliberately confusing time travel occult narrative the game is trying to convey when the writing doesn't seem interested in making that story compelling or even telling it without falling back on a bunch of internet culture references.

Give it a try if it looks interesting to you, though. I genuinely do feel like this could end up clicking really hard for a lot of people who vibe more with its sense of humor.