Publisher/developer: Phosfiend Systems Format: PC Release: Out now
Fract OSC is inscrutable. You’re dropped into a gorgeous polygonal neon world without a single line of text to get you started, no flashing objective marker to show the way, no patient explanation of its systems to help you along. The only things Phosfiend Systems explicitly reveals is that one mouse button locks your view and the other lets you interact with certain objects. After that, you’re on your own.
With nothing to do but wander, you set out and start to learn, unpicking this world piece by piece. You happen upon small round structures whose walls move politely aside as you approach; when inside, switching to Interact mode reveals a star map of sorts. Later, you’ll be able to travel between the ones you’ve visited by riding an invisible monorail. For now, you head off to a large, conspicuously lit nearby structure, the soft hum of a synth growing louder as you approach.
There you’ll find a spatial puzzle with an objective that quickly becomes apparent – rotating platforms to connect a beam of light between two doors, turning dials to complete circuits, sliding blocks into holes – but with a design of such complexity that it might take an hour to solve. The block puzzles are especially intricate: each moves along a single axis, and you can’t move one at all unless you’re standing on a colour-coded platform, getting to which is a puzzle in itself.
Fract OSC won the Best Student Game gong at the 2011 Independent Games Festival awards.
Getting stuck can frustrate in a game that gives you so little in the way of instruction, but the music keeps you going, building up as you progress, a new element arriving in the mix for each successful step you take through a puzzle. It’s no mere soundtrack, either. Those circuitry puzzles, for instance, aren’t just about lining up components in the right order: power must pass through meters whose needles are manipulated into position by tweaking volume or effects levels.
When you succeed and the final piece of the puzzle slots into place, your reward isn’t a text backslap, achievement popup or skill point, but a drop. Beats and bass crash in as the record you’ve been piecing together reaches a crescendo. It’s like having Boards Of Canada noodling away behind you as you work on the world’s hardest jigsaw puzzle and both of you having two very different eureka moments at the same time.
Where playing Proteus meant finding beauty in its procedurally generated musical chaos, Fract OSC’s use of music is rigidly authored, and is all the more powerful for it. It can be too obtuse at times, but the rewards are quite unlike anything else in games: the music peaks, a laser beam rockets off into the sky, and you turn, heading off after that distant synth, in search of your next project deeper in the neon unknown.
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