Santa Monica Studio has brought a varied range of titles to PlayStation platforms over the years. Flower, Journey and Sound Shapes sit in its roster alongside the excellent PixelJunk suite of games, as well as the God of War and Fat Princess series. Its latest hails from the more experimental end of the spectrum, in the form of Playstation 4’s Bound.
Developed by Plastic Demoscene Group under the Santa Monica banner, Bound sees you diving deep into the memories of a young woman through her art. You’ll explore several worlds presented in an abstract form that tie into one of her key memories. Barring some brief dialogue at the outset of each, it’s up to the player to determine what each means and how they combine to form an overall narrative.
As you make your way through each world, you take the form of a dancer, ostensibly an extension or avatar of the young woman. All her movements are presented in the form of dance, from walking and running, jumping, climbing and being affected by hazards in the environment. It’s clear great care was taken to ensure these movements flowed naturally from one to the other – not once did a moment jump out where the transition between different animations seemed stilted or unnatural. The avatar moves gracefully with confidence, and it’s a real kick to see something as basic as moving a block presented with the kind of flair that Bound does.
It’s not all pirouettes and pas de Bourées, however. The abstract nature of the environment means sometimes these natural movements don’t gel perfectly with a world that isn’t subject to normal physics. As the environment twists and turns, it can become frustrating to coordinate the avatar’s movement with the world. The variable distance of her jumps – or perhaps it’s more fitting to call them leaps – meant I often threw her out into the abyss by mistake. While many platforms seem to enlist a kind of auto-aim to make sure you move smoothly from one spot to the next, moving with too much gusto breaks the flow and rewards you with a plaintive scream and a quick reset to one of the frequent checkpoints. It’s not a huge issue – and could be as much player error as a flaw with the controls – but it did leave me frustrated more than once in a game that should be all about calm and beauty.
The rendering of each world is one of Bound’s best qualities. Built out of blocky, simplistic geometry, the world assembles and collapses as you move through it. You can see jumbles of shapes in the distance, knowing you’ll eventually make your way there; and that they will resolve themselves into something new by the time you arrive. Enough space is created around the avatar so you’re rarely at a loss as to which way to go, while still keeping a lid on where you’re going to end up. The end of each level sees you moving at speed through the level itself, watching this whole mechanic move at speed. It’s an impressive technical feat to have so many objects and elements moving in unison, and either involved some brilliant mathematics or painstaking manual work to stitch it all together.
As the icon on the Playstation Store proudly proclaims, Bound is Playstation VR-compatible -– I’m not lucky enough to have a PSVR kit to test this out (it’s not released yet!), but it will definitely be worth a look when the headsets start arriving later this year. This is the kind of game that will work best in a virtual reality framework – bright, colourful and removed from any sense of realism. Playing in 2D is by no means a disadvantage, and I encourage anyone with a preference for ‘artsy’ games to give this a shot. It’s not without its issues, but Bound presents traditional platforming mechanics with an artistic flair that really sets it apart.
Bound was reviewed using a promotional code on Playstation 4 as provided by the publisher.
Review: Bound
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