Imagine Me – A Boy In Limbo on Early Access
by Julie Morley
[divider]
There will be plenty of obstacles and challenges along the way.
Imagine Me was funded on Kickstarter about three years ago and in March, KinifiGames released the Steam Early Access version. Imagine Me is a platform adventure for Windows, Mac, and Linux available on Steam that will eventually be released on Nintendo WiiU; overall it’s an invigorating platform journey full of bugs, challenges, and tons of retries that was a unique experience.
Imagine Me delivers lots of challenges and retries.
Some people have this severe problem with Tetris when they play excessively. Eventually, when these individuals manage to break away from the game, everything around them is somehow composed of the blocks they’re meticulously arranging in Tetris. It haunts them. Everywhere the Tetris effect followed. That is about the closest sensation to describe my post-gameplay experience with the highly addictive and challenging Imagine Me.
Robbe, the main character, is afraid of dungeons and somehow has to fight through them in this limbo.
When I say levels were replayed dozens of times, I’m not exaggerating in the slightest bit. Given that Imagine Me is only in Early Access, the current version was difficult to say the least. Sometimes controls were buggy and uncooperative, causing the boy to miss many jumping opportunities and often make contact with the most dreaded of spikes resting on the platforms. Now, I stress that this game is Early Access on Steam still and is constantly undergoing maintenance and tweaking with frequent updating. I’m not complaining the slightest; it’s just the nature of Early Access games. As such, for my entire playthrough, I kept the games’ current development state in mind.
The levels may seem easy, but I swear, it’ll take several times to get the hang of it.
However, over and over, I repeated the same action only to collide into spikes every single time until by some act of magic, wizardry, or holiness, I managed to escape the loop of horror and frolic away towards the most desired key and eventually the door the ends the level. Each level completion was met with a sigh of relief and excruciating hand cramps.
Upon completing the available content, I found much of Imagine Me’s elements bleeding into my life. The slightest jingle of keys or sight of them felt triumphant and like another hurdle leapt over. Entering doorways felt like an accomplishment met after a long, tiring journey. It sounds pretty awful the more I write about it, but after sitting on the same level for about twenty minutes, repeating your actions over and over, making the exact same mistake on a loop without any breaks, pauses, or really anything to remind the player that there is a world beyond the confines of the game window, you start getting delusional.
Bottom line, avoid death and make it to the door for the next level.
Imagine Me is about a young boy stuck in a state of limbo after a horrific car accident. Robbe has lost his memory. He’s alone and petrified of dungeons. But there’s a catch. He must travel through dungeons to unlock his lost memories. With patience and potential spacebar destruction, I carried Robbe through them and managed to piece his memory together.
The story behind the game is actually darker than the appearance reveals, but it gives the game a shine that you simply cannot turn away from. Imagine Me was quite enjoyable and I’m looking forward to the updated content.
[divider][facebook][tweet][Google][pinterest][follow id=”Cliqist” size=”large” count=”true” ]
