I’m a sucker for a game that plays with your emotions. This can be in an action game or a game that is based on exploration. Games like Life is Strange and Journey come to mind. Arise: A Simple Story is a bit like Journey in a sense. Let’s see if it can keep me intrigued.
A story about life & death, love & loss
The story starts off with your character’s corpse being burned. This is followed by you entering the afterlife. Here you’ll embark on an emotional journey with feelings of love & loss, happiness & sorrow. This is just how life is, like I always say, without downs, there aren’t any ups and you can’t make a rainbow without a little rain. Set out on an adventure through changing landscapes filled with memories. The journey will make you see your life in a different light.
Shape what is flowing
Arise: A Simple Story is a 3D adventure game as they advert. But I would specify it more to be a 3D puzzle platformer. You’ll explore and platform through the environment in a quest for the bittersweet recollections of your past life. You will puzzle-platform through the game by manipulating time and reshaping the surroundings.
With the right stick, you can control the flow of time, which is used in all sorts of ways to platform your way through the game. Your surroundings shift from seconds to entire seasons. All puzzles are pretty simple and consist of simple jumps stringed together. You shift through time to make platforms, like logs, flowers, snails you name it, align so you can platform your way further in the level.
I think they could have made the puzzles a little bit more of a challenge. The main focus of the game however is an emotional adventure game so I get why they opted for this difficulty, the last thing you want is a frustrated player. You can play the game coop as well, however, this is like the Mario Galaxy coop where only one player controls the main character. The second player will take control of the time and aid the first player in the journey.
Piece together the Story
Throughout the levels, there are secrets to be found. These secrets make sure you’ll explore plenty in order to get a better clue on what happened in your past life. These secrets are in the form of drawings, so it’s up to you to interpret the story that is taking place since the game doesn’t feature many words outside of the menus and level names. The camera has a fixed angle, which can zoom in and out a little to your liking, which changes depending on where you are located. This makes it a bit more tricky to find all the secrets because it’s sometimes pointed away from the camera. This also makes it difficult sometimes to judge the angle and distance that you should be jumping at.
Art-style and performance
The original version of Arise: A Simple Story was released on the PS4/Xbox One. The game obviously had to be downgraded for the Nintendo Switch version since those consoles are more powerful and in 4K. But the game doesn’t look bad on the Nintendo Switch at all. The art style of the game is more artistic than realistic. The environment is overall pretty low in polygons but this is made up of lighting which makes the game feel complete and pleasant.
The close-up (cutscene) sections however are not the best. In these sections, the game zooms in on the character. The polygon count or textures are not updated when zooming in to a more high-quality one which results in low-resolution low polygon cutscenes. A shame, but lucky they don’t appear all too much. The game doesn’t run super smoothly either. It tries to perform around 30fps but I had notable frame drops sometimes.
Incredibly emotional load
The soundtrack within the game is absolutely incredible. All the scores carry an emotional or a sense of epicness with them. There was never a moment that I felt the music didn’t fit what was happening. Music always carries a lot of emotional weight, and here they did it right. The original soundtrack as well as an artbook are some of the downloadable extras you get by buying, Arise: A simple story – Definitive Edition that was not available in the original version. Besides this, the Nintendo Switch exclusively also has a photo mode and gyro controls.
Conclusion
Overall I enjoyed the experience Arise: A simple story has brought me. The atmosphere was definitely loaded with emotions, from the OST to the cryptic depictions of your character’s past life. Outside of how the game felt, it was a bit disappointing. The platforming and puzzling were a bit basic and with the fixed angle a little bit frustrating. The graphics were between good and rough at times and the performance was also lacking at times. This made my overall experience mixed. If you are only here for the emotional story you’ll enjoy it. If you are looking for a great platformer look elsewhere. The game probably plays a bit better on other platforms but it will still feel like a lower-budget indie game to me.
