Update One Hundred and Twenty-Two: 2 February 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

I did something I almost never do - I played this game twice in one sitting. Not because this game was particularly good (it was… okay!), but because on Thursday nights my girlfriend goes to play Roller Derby and I miss her so I wanted something to distract me.

Four Sided Fantasy is a sidescrolling platformer with a unique mechanic - with the press of a button you can ‘lock’ your screen, and then your little characters can pass through and out the other side of the screen. There’s vanishingly little story in here, but the fact that your two characters, a girl and a boy, never meet envoke a kind of bittersweet longing, a story told by the mechanics alone. That was nice.

The art was nice! Especially the second world - Fall. It had a wonderfully textured, beautiful world, idyllic and abstracted just enough to fit in with the advertisements for happiness in the 50’s, only slightly, hauntingly disrupted by the inclusion of CCTV camera here and there.

My favorite world in general, mechanic and all, was the third world, Winter. That mechanic was a foreground/background mechanic - one character is in the foreground, the other in the background, you platform between the two. That was fun and intuitive in a way the other levels weren’t, exactly.

The above good points are salvaged out of a wide field of…. meh. Overall, the game is okay. If you love platformers and want to play one with great, interesting mechanics, give it a shot.

Next up: Oh boy…

See you soon!