- The Spectrum Retreat - Review

The biggest mistake you can make when you hear The Spectrum Retreat is to think it's a new sequel to James Bond.
If the cover pages and their names can tell the story, the one they are talking about in this game is definitely wrong.
What could be presumed to be a charged title and a corporal espionage title can in fact not be further than that.

What is the game here about?

The Spectrum Retreat is a hybrid of puzzle and walking simulator. Structurally divided into two parts and each of these parts belongs to one of the mentioned genres. The first part takes place at the Penrose Hotel, a virtual simulation of a place that perfectly adapts to the needs, demands and interests of its clients. Somewhere, however, there was a problem, and in the case of Alex's protagonist, the image of the perfect shelter from the rest of the world was replaced by a prison image. Apart from the room on the first floor where she is staying, the luxurious hotel rooms are completely empty and devoid of life. The only company is the staff of the hotel, the anthropomorphized exhibition puppet of empty facial expressions. Even if she wanted that, she could not get out of the hotel. The entrance doors in the lobby do not work, and the masters are nowhere to look ...

With the simplicity of its basic premises, The Spectrum Retreat is very close to Valve's Portal. The basic and only goal of the game is - to escape. Deceiving the intricate corridors of the hotel in search for relevant information is just the first step in the effort to get Alex into the open roof of the building. Five floors are separated from its goal, and access to each of them was initially banned. In order to gain access, it must hunt for the virtual mechanics of this virtual simulation on strategically located access points.

While parts of the hotel are shaped like a walking simulator, when Alex starts hacking, the game turns into a lot of bloodbath. This process takes place in some kind of cyberspace within the cyberspace, the space of visual design somewhat similar to that of Trona which for some unknown reason has been enriched by the presence of cracks and protective barriers in different colors. By using a special device, Alex has the ability to "suck" the color from the cube and thus drain through a color matching barrier.

The puzzles in this game are designed with the concept of color manipulation. In order to successfully solve the puzzle, Alex will be able to strategically choose how to deploy the dice to successfully pass through the barriers, limited by the ability to single-handedly single-color at one time. With weight, they are heavily affected, and this is the heart of this title and its best aspect. Although they start relatively lightly and quite dull, their complexity is growing rapidly, almost never exceeding the limits of some normal weight. Progress through them also in the memory invokes Portal. Each of the puzzles is placed in their own chambers, and by discovering the solution of a chapel, one gets access to another.

Although The Spectrum Retreat, the twenty-year-old solo project of Dana Smith, through various promotional media perpetuated as a game that in the first place is a narrative experience, is not entirely correct. Parts in which hotel rooms are being explored are indeed motivated by the progress of the work and as such largely correspond to the genre of walking simulators.

On the other hand, parts in the metasyberspace are almost completely depleted of the narrative element and are reduced to repeatedly solving various puzzles with minimal narrative impulse. Because of this, parts, despite the principle quality, can quickly become tedious. It's easy to lose motivation unless you're very much aroused for color movements. Playing this game often reminds you of that ancient phrase - "work hard, play hard". There is no story for a good night before you solve your assignment.

Apart from being structurally divided into two parts, the impression itself of playing and quality is not uniform. And with respect to the story, and in terms of puzzles, it takes too much time to catch the rhythm, then to make a maestral pyramid, but unfortunately it eventually plummeted into the wall. Lack of side characters is a big problem this game fails to solve. While Portal had GLADOS that could send a lifetime back to the exhausted player, Cooper, a person who by telephone helps Alex flee, is more like a doll than a man than blood and flesh.

Although the ambiance of a luxurious but virtually abandoned hotel at moments is really unbelievable, it is difficult to fully enjoy The Spectrum Retreat. The game in the presentation largely suffers from a syndrome called the Seventh Season Games of the Throne: events that should in theory be of the utmost importance for the action with a weak presentation fall out OK, but nothing special.

The quality of the puzzles, in itself a lack of story and a well-struck, anxious atmosphere of a luxurious but vacant hotel, can not handle the whole game alone. Separation of stories and gameplay, as well as a static way of presenting events, lead to (pre) rapid saturation. Play The Spectrum Retreat can be enjoyable, but only in dieting portions. For a game that lasts for only five hours - quite unpleasant.






Here is the Spectrum Retreat gameplay,enjoy: