Got a little way in. I played BASS a few years ago, enjoyed it and got very close to the end but then got stuck and never went back to it for some reason, I think. Anyway, I'm still liking this. It looks great even though the pixel art is a little smeary in places. The opening intro, a motion comic with art by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame, is full of artefacting too. It's kind of disappointing at this stage to not get an animated intro regardless, though. Gabriel Knight used still comic-panel-style art for some of its cutscenes too, and it always feels cheap. Even Revolution's own Lure Of The Temptress found a way to have an animated intro on a budget. (The remastered iOS version of BASS redid it with all the same source art at a high res, and doing a better job with the animation and camera moves, which all makes it feel a little more high-value.) Anyway, the game overall looks good, and there's a fair amount of Gibbons' character in there. The voice acting is cheap and cheerful, with a lot of regional Brit accents in there, giving it a Monty Python or Aardman feel. The writing is great so far - a pulpy dystopian setting that draws on a bunch of influences from 1984 to Mad Max, some gory deaths, lots of British slang, and a robot sidekick who constantly slags you off and complains about you transferring his circuit board to a vacuum cleaner. The puzzles are fine so far, nothing too ridiculous and they make use of the setting well. And I very rarely bump into any of the Virtual Theatre issues that plagued Lure Of The Temptress.
I'm now stuck - I think my prime goal is to get the elevator working, and I've managed to distract a worker elsewhere so I can flip a switch, but that doesn't seem to have affected anything. So either it's a puzzle I don't need to solve yet, or I've missed something. I'm sure I solved most of this game without a walkthrough last time, so I'd really like to manage it again! I'll take a break and see if something clicks when I come back to it...
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Okay, I finally came back to this and finished it off. It really is a very rough diamond - it's full of character, with a strong British feel, loads of cool ideas, some lovely (if hampered) art, and an effective dystopian atmosphere full of death and body horror and small-mindedness, but it often fails to overcome its low production values, a fair few puzzles range from fiddly and confusing to straight-up unfair, and the story is very rushed.
Rating: Orange.
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