The Redress of Mira is the latest from visionary game designer Tonguç Bodur. I’ve reviewed one previous title form him, Finding the Soul Orb. In this modern classic, you’ll play as Mira, hell-bent on revenge against the murderer of your father. Utilizing the Unreal Engine and many store-bought assets and songs you’ll journey across the land using your magic staff to solve the same puzzle thirty or more so times. That’s about it for the gameplay loop, so let’s break down the rest.
Torture
The Redress of Mira is one of the worst gaming experiences of my life. I live-streamed my playthrough of the title and felt the sunk cost fallacy almost immediately. Mr. Bodur utilizes the Unreal Engine asset store heavily in his titles, and this one is the best-looking of the two I’ve seen (he’s made 21). The backstory is that you are a woman named Mira chasing after the murder of your father. After a very short opening intro, we head back two days in time and the game tells you that the woman whose father was murdered is named Brinelle and that Mira killed him. This startling lack of attention to detail permeates throughout the story. All lore is told through random books found in chests that take 15 seconds to open up, every single time. Who wrote these books and placed them throughout the odd European/Britain world? No clue!
At one point you find a German Shepherd with blue flashlights for eyes, and some random guy is desperate to kill you. By the end you make a binary choice, and no matter what none of it makes a damned lick of sense. This feels like an achievement game, as every achievement in the game is finding and walking near a flock of birds until the end. I missed two flocks, which made me sad, but still for a few hours of painful work, I had over 900 achievement points. You can continue after making your first choice and quickly get the other ending and Gamerscore as well.
There are few options in the game, though you can choose from three voiced languages. English, Turkish, and German are available voice wise and there are double that number in subtitles. The game aims for 60 fps and rarely hits it, running terribly despite looking somewhere between mediocre (when you’re far away from an object) to bad (when you’re close to one). Asset quality looks ok until you get up close and then everything is a pixelated and blurry mess. The gameplay is no better, either.
Pain
The gameplay loop finds you using the left trigger to suck up mana from rabbits that glow green. You use this mana to complete the game’s two puzzle types. The first finds you at a magical glass wall and you need to use your mana to locate the part of a stone that triggers the glass showing off artwork. This artwork looks great and depicts the game’s lore in simple line drawings. The other puzzle type is using your mana to shoot green crystals, which open up paths for platforming. Jumping feels alright and is the highlight of the gameplay. Climbing however features one of the worst animations I’ve ever seen. Mira has to stop and reset entirely in between every step. A few times you’ll need to push things in the environment around. Mira has the power of levitation as she grabs the item and then hovers forward without animating at all to move it. It looks awful and happens far too many times.
The worst part of the game are the combat sections. Three times you’ll be tasked with fighting some random guy with blue face paint straight out of Fable. He attacks you and if it hits he runs away for 20 seconds. You can take three hits before dying, or put on god mode and not go insane. To attack him you need to suck off three rabbits in the area and use their mana to shoot him. The first time requires 3 hits, the second fight took 9 hits, and the final fight took 15. It is a miserable, unbalanced mess of an experience.
There are dream sequences and lots of environmental lever-based puzzles and not one of them is well done. The only decent thing in the game is the store-bought music. Whether it’s Envato, Epidemic Sound or some other store the selection on offer is far above the rest of the game in quality. The voice acting in particular was terrible in the English dub that I had on.
Wrapping Things Up
The Redress of Mira is an oddly titled, terrible experience. It never plays well, and never looks good. It will, however, get you a lot of achievement points in a relatively short period of time.
