Return to Grace fell into my hands earlier this month. It has a pleasant plot and pleasant voice acting. It’s hard to say that I’m a big fan of this genre, but from time to time some of its representatives attract my attention, and to dilute everything that is happening in the world of games now, sometimes an easy game comes along and helps in time. This is our Return to Grace PC review.
At the beginning of this month, we released Diablo, and we had to save the world from the invasion of Mother. After that, there was Amnesia: The Bunker, where we had not to save the world but were charged with helping one small but important soul get out. And for dessert this month, we had Final Fantasy XVI, where the whole gameplay is a loading screen for a cutscene and one after another. But it’s us in this game who have to save the world and you know …
It’s hard work, you know. First, you save the world here, then there, and then all sorts of additional worlds with their stories. And it’s hard work! But after that, games like Return to Grace come when you have a few hours of free time. You don’t need to shoot, run around locations, or fight huge Monsters here. You immerse yourself in the atmosphere and plot, and only in moments of fatigue from all the action and running around in such games are valued the most.
“The Vale: Shadow of the Crown” is Creative Bytes Studios’ previous game and was nominated for “The Game Awards.” This is an indicator that their newest game is worth digging into deeper and seeing if the developers can surpass themselves and correct the mistakes made in the previous game. But the game’s nomination fell into the “Innovation in Accessibility” category, and the game itself – an interactive audiobook with RPG elements – is not the most common combination. Moreover, the reviews are “very positive,” and if you do not look at the graphics, the company managed to make a project that the audience liked only for the sound, which means that at least a decent script should be expected in the walking simulator along with good voice acting – which is not a reason to try.
We play as cosmo archaeologist Adamari Ito, who searched for a mysterious artificial intelligence named Grace, who once ruled the life of the solar system’s inhabitants. We have 3820 in the yard, humanity has been plowing the expanses of space for a long time, and Grace switched off nine hundred years ago, and no one remembers why. And about what Grace is, modern people have a rather vague idea, so Adamari, or, as her friends call her, Adi, based on rumors and surviving artifacts, concludes that Grace is on Ganymede and goes there to try to find him. The ship suffers a hard landing, and instead of fixing it, our heroine searches for a radio beacon, the signal she caught – it seems to be next to it. The oxygen in the spacesuit should be enough for a short time. amount of time.
After some time, she discovers a large building and finds it, but the main entrance is closed, so the girl decides to get inside through the air ducts. And those, unfortunately, lead lower and lower, and even very slippery … In general, as you guessed, we find ourselves somewhere in the area of technical floors, fortunately – just a few steps away from the installed radio beacon on the control panel with a big start button. What do you think will happen next? Oddly enough, after pressing the button, our communicator, through which we communicated with the artificial intelligence of the ship, is captured by a new personality – the Logic, part of Grace’s intelligence. She would be happy to tell us something, but she herself is not very aware of what is happening. Now, if the generator could be fixed… This is how we travel through the complex where Grace once was.
“Return to Grace” runs on the Unreal Engine, so the quality of the picture is limited, perhaps, only by the imagination and skill of the creators. Here everything is done on a solid “four”. There is snow on the street locations, and therefore there is nothing to look at. pipes and fans. The generator room with the indispensable crane will make you think of a bunch of first-person walkers from the beginning of the millennium. And yes, generators… With the advent of residential floors, the graphics become more interesting. There is a garden, pleasant to the eye, but no frills, except you can meditate a little in the gazebo. The same sparingly furnished guest rooms with concrete perforated structures on the balconies easily evoke memories of the same type of houses that have not yet gone into an irrevocable past. An insane amount of flashing lights on appliances and green-copper panels on the walls will make you remember the age when computers were very large – such retrofuturism.
What I liked most about Return to Grace is the “characters” that inhabit this game, and the whole game is built around them. I have already talked about Logic, and then you will have to activate other components of Grace’s artificial intelligence that “infuse” and create her. There will be Control, Empathy, and even their hybrids, so to speak. Each has its own character. Buddy, with a young voice, will constantly incite us to some boyish pranks, Mommy will patronize, and Logic will threaten to turn off Buddy because he is one fussy. Watching their gunfights is much more interesting than exploring the complex of rooms we find ourselves in. There is enough talk to fill the time of moving from one point to another and studying only a little of what is there.
And it is this detail that creates the feeling that you are going through the game in a fairly large company, and everyone is interested to know what will happen next. In my opinion, such a move is a significant success for the authors, and what I liked the most.
As for studying the complex itself, everything is pretty ordinary here. Before us is an almost linear walking simulator, where the movement is only forward, you will have to return only once, and even then, not for long. The walk is punctuated by simple actions, such as catching a signal by turning the communicator, maintaining balance while walking along a beam, drawing a pixelated picture from a description, repeating a sequence of keystrokes, typing a number in binary code, and so on. the last two types of puzzles can be solved for you by a member of our team, and even a little offended if you still decide to go through them yourself, they say, why bother if there is a ready answer, to which Logic will answer that you can enjoy overcoming difficulties.
There could have been more classes, for my taste – combining the two components of artificial intelligence was not enough, and all these combination locks, although ordinary, are boring – more variety would not hurt. The branching claimed is minimal: in a few places, you can shorten your path a little, for example, by walking along a beam or admitting that logic is not your forte. Instead of exploring a few additional rooms, in return, you will learn a little less about the local world. Some minor little things will be remembered for you in the final. There are only two alternative endings, but there were no free saves, so I had to play the game again. However, in any case, the game will not take you much time: the first passage along the long path took me two and a half hours, and the second one along the shortened one – an hour. And this is quite enough – the story lasts exactly as long as necessary, and the developers did not delay, for which they are a plus.
In the end, Return to Grace is closer to fantasy in a sci-fi setting, with a good dose of gentle humor, bright character, and even superbly voiced characters with simple gameplay. The most pleasant thing is to spend the evening without straining.
Return to Grace is now available for PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.
