Disorder has given me a new found respect for the puzzle-platformer genre by emphasizing what not to do when making one.
The central hook in Disorder is the ability to switch between a light world and a dark world. Doing so changes the environment in various ways, allowing you to progress in the game. This is not a new mechanic, but Disorder uses it well. The platforming challenges your fingers more than it does your mind. However, each set of obstacles are tricky in their own way, and the game steadily increases its difficulty by combining hazards in clever ways. It just doesn’t know when to stop ramping up its difficulty.
But before we get into that, the dual-world system is also used to convey story in a (potentially) interesting way. Text appears onscreen at certain checkpoints, broken up into single sentences, and we’re given a glimpse into the disordered mind of the protagonist.
These inner thoughts change when you switch between worlds, and this change raises many interesting questions. Sometimes each world offers its own separate thoughts on a subject, but sometimes they seem to expand on each other, and if you switch back and forth fast enough, they can even blend together into a single monologue. The thoughts of each world read like two dueling personalities, unaware of each other but influencing each other, communicating without even knowing it. This seems to be a clever way of portraying Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I don’t know if that was the intention. The protagonist seems to suffer from depression, not multiple personalities, so what’s the point of the dual thoughts and dual worlds?
Disorder raises these interesting ideas, but the ideas never cohere into anything meaningful. The writing remains frustratingly vague at all times, and the individual sentences that flash onscreen are actually randomized, complicating any attempt to read more deeply into them.
Perhaps that’s the point, that these thoughts are constantly in flux, constantly on the brink of coherence, yet never forming into common sense. In which case, it’s a clever way to put us into the mind of the character, but at some point, the game needs to pull out of his head to show me that I’m actually in his head and that this jumbled writing is more than just jumbled writing. Otherwise, Disorder is just that: a jumbled mess.
However, I confess that maybe it all comes together in the end. I wouldn’t know because I didn’t finish Disorder. While the platforming is initially good, it eventually ratchets up its difficulty too much and everything about the game falls apart.
The controls remain fine, but the dark and moody art becomes a detriment rather than an asset. The color scheme of each level ensures that the background blends into the foreground, and colors bleed into each other turning some platforms nearly invisible. The camera is then pulled back oddly far, shrinking everything on screen and making danger even harder to see.
Often times I had to do a dry run of a puzzle just to figure out where the walls and spikes and bounce pads were located. Then, once I understood the layout, I could start on actually trying to get though it. The “puzzle” part of this puzzle-platformer was simply a matter of deciphering the level through the art.
This approach worked up until Disorder became a bullet-hell game with shifting gravity, shifting guns, shifting platforms, bullets everywhere, one life to get through it all. Oh, and you’re playing the game upside down. It becomes mercilessly, maddeningly difficult, and whatever profundity the game once had disappears in my frustration. Whatever the game wants to say about depression and loss and life, I don’t care. I just want this game to end.
Disorder doesn’t know how to balance its gameplay with its story or its art with its gameplay. It’s a game whose individual pieces work well on their own — the art would be effective in a horror game that’s more about mood than precision, and the bullet-hell segments would be fine in a game of that genre — but when mixed together, they only break what was in the beginning a pretty fun game.
If that is the game’s grand meta point, that it feels so disordered because its protagonist’s mind is so disordered, then it certainly succeeds. But it succeeds in a way that makes me think less of it, not more of it.