Transient: Extended Edition | Nintendo Switch Review
Transient: Extended Edition, developed by Stormling Studios and published by Iceberg Interactive, is a sci-fi puzzle game set in a cyberpunk/Lovecraft inspired universe. It is currently available on Windows PC, PlayStation, XBox, and Nintendo Switch, and for the purpose of my review I was playing the Nintendo Switch version in handheld mode.
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You take on the role of Randolph Carter who lives in a time where the Earth has become essentially uninhabitable; due to this, a mega corporation rose up and built an underground city where people could live. After traversing across the barren Earth that is now a barren wasteland, Randolph wakes up to discover that he’s getting messages from dead people and your job is to solve their murders and figure out what is going on in this mysterious world. If I’m totally honest, I struggled to grasp much more than that narrative wise and generally found the story to be quite vague in some areas and massively convoluted in other areas, leaving me feeling quite confused when it came to cutscenes and portions of the lore.
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The bulk of the gameplay is walking from place to place scanning bodies for their memories, examining them for any signs of what happened to them and solving some puzzles along the way. Overall the puzzles are difficult enough to make you experiment and try different solutions and you would have to engage a few brain cells, but they're not difficult enough that you find yourself running to Google for answers. Throughout the five chapters there's a decent variety of puzzles so it never really started to feel terribly repetitive either. One of my favourite types of puzzles I found within Transient was the hacking scenarios where you have to sneak around and bypass security bots and your aim is to collect files. This variety turned Transient from a walking simulator with a majorly confusing plot to a fun little puzzler.
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The visuals throughout Transient were quite good. They managed to capture the futuristic cyberpunk kind of feeling but also managed to incorporate an eerie gothic style into it. Even on the Nintendo Switch the graphics held up quite well so I can equally imagine the PlayStation version would be even better.
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I didn’t quite connect with Transient: Extended Edition. The puzzles in and of themselves are most certainly where the game shines brightest; however I spent so long trying to suss out exactly what was going on in terms of the story that I just gave up on understanding. Perhaps if I’d played other games in the series I wouldn’t feel like this but I just feel like the plot was so convoluted and tried to do too much in such a short space of time. Fans of games like Observer: System Redux may enjoy Transient: Extended Edition due to the Cyberpunk dystopia that takes place within.
Lj’s Rating: 2 out of 5.
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For more information on Transient: Extended Edition please use the following links...
Stormling Studios - Developer | Facebook | Twitter | Website
Iceberg Interactive - Publisher | Facebook | Twitter | Website
Many thanks to Iceberg Interactive for the Review Key.
Transient: Extended Edition | Windows PC | PlayStation | XBox | Nintendo
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