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Poor across the spectrum

  • NTC3
  • 03/11/2017 02:00 PM
  • 1243 views
How to start off a review of a (supposedly) 10-minute game? Well, one could probably observe that RBG in the title of this game clearly stands for red-blue-green, the three main parts of the visible colour spectrum. These colors make up the dominant colour schemes of each monochrome level, and there’s an ending associated with each one of those. Most interesting or notable things about the game end here.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



RBG Colors is another game without a menu theme. There are some other instances where you can end up wandering for a while without anything, but otherwise, the RTP/freesound music is present and even quite fitting at times. The mapping is very plain in the initial, green areas, but is considerably better in the blue and red ones.

Gameplay



You walk, occasionally finding the one thing per map you are allowed to interact with, which is nearly always the map exit/transition. The one exception is the dandelion here, which actually acts as a save point, and doesn’t affect any of the endings as you might have assumed. In fact, pretty much the only time to trigger it is if you get on the path to the red ending, when it throws you back to this starting screen, as otherwise it is a complete waste.

Storyline



The game begins with this series of 6 or so text boxes over a black screen with no sound at all playing, which is not a good impression even if the text is well-written and grammatically correct. Here, however, it's neither of those things, and the result can be quite funny, like above. The various errors (mainly lowercase "i", even at the beginning of the sentence) are so numerous that “What was she doing staring at those flowers?” is a sentence that genuinely surprises due to being 100% grammatically correct, and the first such sentence in the game. Pretty much all of the script here needs to be run through Word spellchecker at the very least.

Otherwise, though, the storyline is annoying at best. The protagonist is clearly unsympathetic to say the least, and once he mentions his girlfriend at the start, you should already suspect what happened, and her ghostly figure a little while later basically confirms it, soon before you quickly get either green or blue ending, depending on which turn you take during a fork in the road. There’s not much interest in getting a red one afterwards besides completionism, and the way of getting it is certainly more than a little obscure: you have to spot a particular thing in the corner of a blue map, and afterwards, you have to be aware that “I have to go back!” is literally referring to the red area: it’s quite reasonable to assume in the context of the game it might mean back to the house, or further into the blue area, but doing so gets you completely unaltered green/blue endings, simply wasting your time. This is why it’s best to take advantage of that dandelion only once you are on the way to getting said ending. Is it worth it? Well…

Conclusion



RBG Colors is unfortunately little more than a short and failed attempt at an art game. Its competence at any particular aspect is limited at best. However, when its true ending looks like this, it’s just too unintentionally hilarious to give it an even lower score.

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