Reed Remastered - Review

I love games, and as anyone that also loves games known, there is never enough time to play everything. This means having to sometimes pick and choose carefully what to spend your time playing, so for example going on the PlayStation Store and checking out Indie games and falling into a rabbit hole is never a good idea. Two hours later and (a lot less money in my bank account) I found some games that looked like fun. One of those games was Reed Remastered, and at €4.99 what did I really have to lose?


Every now and again I love a Chinese Spring Roll from a restaurant, little crispy, full of vegetables and I sometimes even lull myself into thinking they are healthy. Now if I want one (or more) I usually am getting them with another dish but if I want the solo I feel bad ordering one item and go for the frozen option. I cannot say this enough DO NOT BUY FROZEN SPRING ROLLS. They may look the same but they are not, a cheap imitation that will make you question whether you like spring rolls at all. Playing Reed Remastered I found myself was I eating a spring roll from a restaurant or a frozen abomination?

Story


You are Reed, a small white rabbit plushy looking thing who is created to stop the destruction of the digital domain. That's it. Even when completing the game there is just a small pat on the back and that is it.


Overall the story is paper-thin and for an Indie game that can be okay as long as all the other elements are good.

Visuals


I'm a sucker for a few things in this life, coconut flavoured or smelling things, head massages and pixel graphics.  The visuals in Reed Remastered are okay and, and certainly have some similarities to the game Fez.  There are friendly creatures in the world which kind of look like a fish wearing spectacles with purple hair. The enemies look like angry hairless chickens - luckily they look scarier than they are and a quick jump on their head stuns them.


Overall the game seems to borrow from other better Indie games but fails to add anything unique or interesting enough to set it apart from others.


Music


The soundtrack is rather peaceful featuring lots of ambient sounds. Unfortunately, I was unable to track down the soundtrack. The soundtrack was composed by Oleg Hosoutsou, the font used in the credits was hard to decipher so there is a chance I may have read the name incorrectly.


Overall a calming soundtrack that had nods towards the Fez soundtrack. Was the Reed Remastered soundtrack bad? No. Was is it memorable? Also no.

Gameplay


The game is a puzzle-ish platformer which has fifty levels/rooms. Like many games of this genre, they start difficult and then increase in difficulty. There are traps and many spikes that stand in your way, each level has you collect a cube and then navigate to the exit. While the game itself was not overall challenging or fun there was one element I really enjoyed - the 1-pixel of death as I call it. Old school games could be unrelenting and be a single-pixel too far in one direction or another could spell death. Reed Remastered is incredibly good at replicating this and gave me a rich feeling of nostalgia.


Overall the gameplay worked, each level could be finished in a couple of moments or minutes (depending on how many times you die). While the gameplay worked it never felt that fun and again provided nothing that has not been seen many times before.




Final Thoughts

So, after a little over two hours how did I feel? Disappointed. The story is lacking, the visuals were uninspired, the music was good enough and the gameplay worked but never felt exciting. If the game had not been so cheap I would be a lot more disappointed. In honesty, I am not sure how or why this game got remastered but I guess that is sometimes the way of things, this one gets a 2 out of 5