Developed by Innovina and Studio kiku, The Plane Effect is a puzzle game that immerses us in a world as earthly as it is dystopian. An isometric adventure where we must help an office worker to get home, on a path full of dangerous obstacles and an increasingly present evil presence.
The Plane Effect is available for PC, PS4 and PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S and Nintendo Switch.
No way home
The Plane Effect It puts us in the shoes of an unnamed office worker trying to return home after a mundane day at work. The man in question – who does not have a face or a specific story either – seems to have a monotonous life: the context makes us understand that he repeats the same routine every day. One day, at the end of his workday, he decides to do what any tired office worker would do: go home. Of course, the path to your home will not be a simple task. Dozens of obstacles (including giant tentacles that seek to end our life) will get in the way.
Thus, the title plunges us into a surreal adventure full of Lynchean touches. The Plane Effect it constantly takes us back and forth between the most mundane situations to completely outlandish situations that make us wonder how real what the protagonist is going through. Many of them seem to be figments of his imagination, but others show a terror so present that it seems useless to try to escape.
I ask you for one, Barba
The Plane Effect It is a puzzle game of the most basic (or not so much there). At the beginning, it gives us the possibility to choose between three levels of difficulty: normal, visual track or guided. For obvious reasons I chose the normal difficulty (the one that does not give us any clue about how to solve the puzzle that lies ahead), and I must say that it was one of the worst decisions I made in my life. Puzzle solving is not intuitive at all. Not only is it usually completely outlandish, but it’s also extremely arbitrary. Example: if I drop something into the pool and I have to use a fishing rod, it will not let me grab the fishing rod without first having grabbed another object.
To this is added that, since there are scenarios where we must collect various elements to solve multiple puzzles, we do not have an inventory to see and analyze the objects that we have under our belt.
Leaving aside the puzzles –which are the heart of the game–, I find myself with another big problem: the movement of the character. It is unnecessarily slow, no matter what we hold tight for it to run. Being a game in part of exploration, this slowness is the most annoying and adds a new grain of sand to make the experience even more frustrating.
But, there is even more –as our beloved Homer Simpson would say–, the isometric perspective present in the game and its fixed camera make the handling of the character in the platform sections completely crude. The precision that is required does not match the possibilities of movement and analysis of the environment that we are given. This will lead us to, for example, fall from the height and have to repeat the climb. In short: one more punishment.
The perfect balance between the mundane and the surreal
Not all are negative points in The Plane Effect. Both its graphic section and its sound section have points to stand out in a positive way. The combination of both elements manages to immerse us in an atmosphere perfectly in line with what the game seeks through its history.
The graphic style itself is rather minimalist, although with minimal details that accentuate the unrealism of this world. The color palette, meanwhile, turns to a muted tone (predominantly gray), although, at times, saturation explodes, which helps to convey not only the emotions of the character, but also the dangers of the environment that affect us. surrounds. The graphic section is also accompanied by a variety of scenarios that give a breath of fresh air to the rough gameplay.
The ever-present ambient sound fully enhances the atmosphere of the title. Playing it with headphones immerses us fully in this world, making us feel that we really are in the shoes of this faceless office worker. The soundtrack, for its part, appears at the right times, avoiding being invasive and / or repetitive.
System Requirements
MINIMUM: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system – OS: 64-bit Windows 10/8/7 – Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz / AMD FX-8150 3.6GHz or equivalent – Memory: 4 GB of RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 550 Ti / Radeon HD 6790 2GB VRAM – Storage: 4 GB available space
RECOMMENDED: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system – OS: 64-bit Windows 10
Processor: Processor – Core i5 2.8GHz processor. – Memory: 8 GB of RAM – Graphics: GPU – NVIDIA GTX 1080 or equivalent video card with a dedicated memory of 2GB or high VRAM. – Storage: 4 GB available space