Developer: Robot House
Publisher: Hammerfall Publishing
RRP: £7.19 (Steam)
Released: 12th December 2017
Available on: Steam
Played Using: Xbox 360 Control Pad
Approximate game length: 4 Hours
Welcome to the future, where robots are norm and AI can help you with everything. Well, most things anyway. For example, who knew that the life of a vacuum cleaner could be filled with mystery and intrigue? Not me that’s for sure, I’ll never take the little dirty sucker for granted again.
In Rumu you play as an automated vacuum cleaner named Rumu who loves everything, absolutely everything. You aren’t the only automated thing in this house though, everything from the kettle to the fridge have their own AI that you can have a limited interaction with where they tell a joke or fact. However much more importantly, and prominently is the household AI Sabrina who control the household and guides you.
I’d love to tell you that at first all seemed well and then it started to spiral but I’d be lying from the very start something is… off. And when I say the very start I mean right from the tutorial levels, you quickly start to learn that Sabrina may not be being entirely forthcoming with information.
Being that this is such a short game (approximately four hours long) I can’t really speak on the story other than to say that despite it being so short its well worth it. And for you budding games designers out there pay close attention to this game, there’s a lot of environmental storytelling that allow the player to infer what has occurred previously in this house. Admittedly the game will end up spelling it out for you eventually but there are still lots of little details that make the whole thing feel more fleshed out.
Unfortunately there are a couple of things that irked me about this game, which is a real shame because it was really impressing me. The first of these things was the strange choice the developers made of making the control pad use [B] as the main interaction button and [A] as the ‘go back/cancel’ button. Sadly there seems to be no way to reconfigure this within the game. The second and far more egregious thing is the number of bugs. I encountered several in my playthrough with one or two of them forcing me to quit and reboot the game. Thankfully the space between autosaves is quite short.
Even with the bugs and controller issues I still recommend giving this game a go, its a lot of fun and I found myself compelled to uncover the mysteries this game presented.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Gone Home
Firewatch
