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DEMO Review: Glitched- It's ok to say, "It doesn't have to be that way."

I'm aware that this is merely just a demo for the game, and while most everything is subject to change with it being pretty early in development, I believe that there are plenty of things to be said about Glitched, from its place among subversive RPGs to its "self-expressive" mechanics.

Story: Interesting Thought-piece

Before anything begins, you get an introduction that immediately colors your experience with GLITCHED a fourth wall breaking iridescent orange as a frog in a suit interviews you, as a player of a video game. From then on, after being assigned a character to control, it throws you in the world more as an observer than a participant with a snazzy vignette that serves as a quick look into the cast and their interactions. And through a series of events, we come in control of Gus, a character that "looks" back at us from the screen.

The rest of the events that unfold are what we experience in tandem with Gus now that he knows of us, the player. There are many games/media that play with this notion, the realization of the fourth wall, while others seem content to make light of it or go full ham-philosophical with it, GLITCHED gives us a unique perspective of the situation where the player, with this unprecedented case, can choose and guide Gus through this new point of view. Your control over Gus at this point extends to your effect on him as a person, both mentally and emotionally. Speaking of having an effect on people...

Gameplay: Keeping some and changing it

GLITCHED itself, is still an RPG with turn-based battles. The way these battles are presented however, not as the main crux of dealing with encounters, but as a way to redefine your ESSENCE, is what sets it apart from the combative norm. The ESSENCE system, essentially is an interesting mechanic, especially since its something that affects gameplay outside of the battlescreen. However due to the length of the demo and the relatively long set up, there hasn't been too much to explore more varieties of situations where it would pay to switch from opposing essences like Bastion to Drift. I feel that to see some of the fruits of your moving around the system, it would entail spending some significant amount of time and looking in the right places for what you ended up choosing to be.

This isn't the mechanic's fault though, being an RPG in a class of its own with almost no reliance on the preconceptions of the genre to support it and abstractions of states that make sense only within its own context can lead players wishing they had stuck along for the longer cutscenes. Mind you, if you're a player looking for the harmony of numerical stats and interlocking mechanics, GLITCHED may not be what you're looking for.

Graphics and Audio: Beauty of the frabricated world

I really don't want to lump graphics and audio together in a review, but seeing as the demo only offered a taste of what's to come, I may have more to write about when I see the rest of the world GLITCHED lets us run around in. RM:MV's looking really good with the new tileset resolution. This enables the pixel art to show off its complex simplicity while many of the sprites and backgrounds exude the earthbound influence, being very much pixelated representations, but not too simplistic to urge you to use your imagination to fill in the blanks. Color's a very important feature as Essences can even affect the way some things look, adhering to a flexible color code.

Along with the fantastic pixel art, we got the music, which succeeds in being very ambient when its called for. There's a particular track that really hits me, it was something that played when I didn't expect it to. Talking to Gus directly for the first time, after a very heavy moment, where tragedy was expected, the game brought me something different, and rather than push me out of the comfort zone to prove its point, the game put me into one.

Overall: 4/5
I'd like to stress again, this is a demo. But for a demo to bring forth so much of its representative game, it makes this something to watch out for. By the time of this review, the developers raised nearly 6x their funding goal on Kickstarter, which would mostly guarantee a few times over that the full game will be released, in its final form. And I want to see what the rest of the game has in store for us when the time comes.