It’s inevitable that our sun will eventually die and, the selfish git that it is, drag any life in our solar system into an unending age of ice and darkness. But we’ve got all the time in the doomed world before that happens. Your kids’ kids won’t even have to bother with it, so why should you? Unfortunately for the denizens of Traverser, Swedish developer Gatling Goat Studios’ environmental puzzler, their sun decided to check out early. Such is the state of Brimstone, a subterranean city with a penchant for clichés.
Ruled by the tyrannical Raven Corporation and split between a lower and upper ring, Traverser and Brimstone wear their Marxist influence on their shared sleeve. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is as cookie-cutter as conflict comes. There is, at least, a unique reason the bourgeoisie and proletariat came to blows: rather than money, theirs is a feud over oxygen, an understandably precious resource in the city’s suffocatingly sulfurous caverns.
Oxygen is nothing more than a vehicle to reinforce Marxist duality and classism, but it does lend Traverser a fresher premise and original atmosphere. Air bars, for example, are an interesting application of the oxygen shortage. “Come try all 100 aromas!” read one charming billboard placed alongside another emblazoned with the surprisingly blunt message, “We are watching you.”
This is reinforced by the game’s aesthetic, a sort of oblong precursor to Claymation. Coupled with the top-down-ish camera, this gives the game an almost dollhouse look. It makes for some wonderful environments but is less effective when applied to characters, leaving them torn between hideously disfigured and artistically stylized, unable to pick a spot in the uncanny valley.
Thanks to Raven, which has inexplicably monopolized what was once the most abundant resource on the planet, air merchants line the upper city’s decadent alleys while lower city residents must fight tooth and nail over a single canister of fresh air, sporting gas masks all the while. You know how it goes: cows go moo, cats go meow and the downtrodden lower class cries “Rebellion!” All would be right with the world were it not for the sudden disappearance of protagonist Valerie Bennett’s father, which is where gameplay moseys in on exposition.
Having recently passed her Traverser exam, the requisite for city guards, Valerie is outfitted with a Gravity Glove, the keystone of the game’s puzzles. You can pick up, throw around and rotate almost everything, though the latter function is about as smooth as bowling with a four-sided ball. Stack boxes to build staircases, swing platforms to build momentum for a jump, arrange pipes to redirect sewage flow—the works.
What’s truly impressive is this system’s organic nature. Traverser absolutely nails what makes environmental puzzlers so captivating: the fog of simplicity. It’s easy to look at a meticulously arranged room in Portal or Project Temporality and think “Oh, I need to get this box to there” or “Clearly this light bridge will be involved.” But in Traverser, the difficulty and satisfaction comes from realizing the solution that’s under your nose using nothing more than common sense and basic physics.
The Gravity Glove is a versatile tool, and the puzzles it’s used to solve are free-form as can be. Logic is king in Traverser. Need to light some TNT? Grab an ember and hold it over the fuse. Need to block those lasers? Well, block them. With a box. Need to sneak an oxygen tank past a pickpocket? Hold it 20 feet in the air. He doesn’t have a Gravity Glove, ha! The game fosters an almost Deus Ex sense of freedom, and I do not say that lightly.
Better still, after a basic tutorial, Traverser offers you absolutely no help. As it shouldn’t: ascending a shambling, haphazard staircase wouldn’t be very fun or creative if you hadn’t made it of your own volition. Which I did, because I couldn’t be asked to fiddle with the rotate mechanic, so I just threw everything in a corner until it worked. And in that one instance, it did. And that’s brilliant.
But much like Brimstone itself, everything about Traverser has two sides. Opposite the exceptional environmental obstacles are contrivedly arranged systems of buttons and levers, frequently calling into question the sanity of the city’s architects. These are yet more plot holes for the pile, and strangely make for a far less engaging experience than the whole box-throwing thing.
The occasional mandatory stealth section, which sees you tip-toe past sleeping guards in plague doctor masks, is another LEGO in the slippers. Hiding in a barrel and pausing occasionally while walking right past armed guards is not stealth, though it is funny in a Looney Tunes kind of way. Contrastingly, evading guards by moving more than 20 feet away, thus erasing your existence from their feeble minds, is just sad.
Narrative, too, can be a bit iffy. Valerie herself is an excellent, if mute character, constantly recording the goings on of the game in her journal with a human and distinctly youthful voice. It’s also impressive to see her reference little details about previous environments and characters in a meaningful way. The game’s fully voiced cast of supporting characters is just as entertaining, their amusing and authentic accents owing to Gatling Goat’s EU origins.
The main problem is that the plot works itself out of a job. It’s hard to build suspense when the entire story is laden with an air of conspiracy and secrecy thicker than Saturday-afternoon smog in China. Not to give any spoilers, but how do you think a three to four-hour romp through a subterranean city whose rulers erected a black box around information pertaining to the surface world will end?
