ARTIFICIAL is an upcoming first-person puzzle platformer developed by Ondrej Angelovic. Taking inspiration from games like Portal and Half-Life, the game's mixture of physics-based puzzles and discovery-based gameplay hopes to capture the essence that made its influences so great. With a demo recently released, I decided to check it out and see if the game lives up to its predecessors.
Right at the start of my time with ARTIFICIAL, I could see the influences on display. The game begins with the players being taken to a worn-down sector in what appears to be an underground facility, made up of low-poly and muted environments reminiscent of the early hours of Half-Life. During this open, players are presented with a light narrative via the operator, who along with giving some exposition, provides a few hints and direction throughout the demo. Little else is explained aside from your objective, which is to investigate a nearby sector after it loses power, with you then whisked into the first few puzzles.
This demo only took around 30 minutes to complete, and in that time I got a small peak at some of ARTIFICIAL’s gameplay and ideas. The game is centred around its physics-based mechanics, as players will interact with nearly every object in their area to make their way through each sector. This amounted to picking up, throwing, and displacing objects in order to overcome the game's obstacles and not much else, bar finding the occasional data drive for some lore and scan points, a series of nodes that once connected net you another collectable. Puzzles involving moving or placing items to reach a ledge or clearing a doorway made up most of my time with the demo, though the last level showcased a bit more of what the full game could entail, with power cells to activate different machines and introduced enemies and more obstacles. It admittedly gave me some flashbacks to my time with Portal but presented in a smaller, more self-contained setting.
The puzzles shared this same sentiment during this demo, with most involving moving or placing items to jump a ledge or clearing a doorway for most of my time with the demo. I did find the last level to be the better example of the game's goals, with a few more ideas, such as power cells to power certain machines and some lasers to avoid, and a bit more variety in the environment and combination of these elements.
In the brief time I had with ARTIFICIAL, I was thinking of the multitude of ways the mechanics of the game can be used to create these “aha” moments, but personally, I didn't think this demo did the best job of really showing the game's potential — the mechanics and puzzles never truly felt integrated together. Naturally, 30 minutes of a demo isn't enough to go off, but it has made me curious about the full game, and what ways these simple mechanics can be used and integrated into the self-contained sections and puzzles the demo demonstrated. Here’s hoping the game does explore that potential, because it could be a pretty good one if they do.
If you fancy trying the demo yourself, it's available now on itch.io, with the full game looking to release on Steam and itch.io sometime in Q4 2022.
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