The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest PC review — Not much of a dilemma

I was a bit wary of The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest before playing it. I’m happy to try out every Metroidvania I can, as it’s one of my three big tentpole genres, so I was hoping it would potentially subvert my expectations. While the script’s humour can make it laugh-out-loud funny in spots, and the game does some clever things, it is not a Metroidvania and is certainly not any better than purely middling due to the blandness of its presentation, the soulless simplicity of its level design, and the unremarkable gameplay that it’s packed with.

The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest starts with a man named Olof going in for some sort of hypnotherapy. His therapist clearly can’t be bothered to actually care, kickstarting the game’s tone, which is irreverent and disinterested in presenting itself as anything but a silly joke. Olof is pulled into a dream world where he’s meant to fight his demons as a man in a cowboy hat named Fletcher. Later on, a character mentions that the entire game feels like a series of silly skits as opposed to anything resembling representations of inner demons, which I found fairly amusing. At least the game is honest about what it is.

Similarly, it routinely stops to make fun of gaming tropes in an incredibly dry way. The dialogue is actually too dry, but I wonder if that might be because it’s translated from another language (although it might just be the writing itself.) Still, the game is mostly funny, even if it can be puerile in a fairly unfunny way. But while I did mostly dig the dialogue, the game looks like such a standard pixel art platformer that it has absolutely no visual identity of its own, even if some of the sprite work is decent. The art direction itself simply isn’t at all interesting.

The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest is billed as a Metroidvania, even within the dialogue itself, as displayed directly above. You explore the game’s rooms in order to unlock bosses. The first two require you to find a coin to unlock them, but the next couple send you to collect several items. Beating bosses will grant you new abilities that you use to press onward, this much is true. But there’s practically nothing to find off the beaten path. Aside from the double jump, the other abilities you unlock, the slide and ground slam, are barely used at all outside of single areas. Making matters worse is that the rooms themselves are randomised each time you start the game. The biomes are in the same places every time, but random rooms are shuffled in instead of logical, lived-in areas.

Due to this, the level design feels scattershot and barely involved. There’s little scrolling, and most rooms are a single screen. Even at that, the rooms are incredibly simple and generally devoid of anything interesting. There’ll be a couple of turrets or enemies firing at you, and you need to bypass them to the exit, but the arrangements are so simple that they reminded me of arcade games from the 80s. As such, most of the game’s runtime is spent in rooms with nothing of interest in them. Most of them aren’t challenging, and nothing is memorable, just a bunch of interchangeable filler with no real reason to explore or care.

Fletcher can jump and shoot, in addition to his slide and slam abilities. The controls are fine for what they are, as it’s just a completely basic platformer that feels very in line with games from the 80s. You can find vinyl records stashed around, but these don’t really do anything that I can see. There are no health upgrades and nothing that really boosts your parameters. The shooting is incredibly basic, and you start with only being able to have a single bullet onscreen at once, although beating bosses will reward you with more. The bosses are similarly unremarkable, with a couple of them being mostly irritating.

They can go on too long (especially the horse and shark bosses) and are mostly based on memorising, although they’re incredibly simple. The dialogue after the shark fight even lampshades the fact that it’s irritating and not particularly well designed, which the dev seems to find pretty humorous. The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest isn’t a difficult game in any meaningful way, but it does seem like it is. This is solely due to the fact that you can only take two hits at any given time. If Fletcher gets hit with his hat on, he loses it. Taking another hit kills him. You need to make your way through the random room layouts and bosses, with only one chance to screw up, which feels archaic and seems like a way to deliberately pad the game out.

There are a few memorable things here and there, though, such as a platforming section where you’re jumping upward on floating platforms with depressing lyrics on them. I’ve never seen anything like that before. One boss battle has you fight against a flying, possessed car. Well, you don’t actually fight the boss, but its health bar instead. It wraps itself around the screen before the fight starts, and you just shoot it. It’s bizarre and silly, but it works. Moments like these show that the dev is clearly capable of doing interesting things with the medium, but too much of the game is too basic, obnoxious, and uninspired to really be worth a look.

Mercifully, the game has an assist mode that lets you restart a room after dying instead of being taken to the last warp room you’ve come across. Resultingly, the game can be beaten in just a few hours, although it can take a good deal longer if you do it the intended way. But considering how uninspired and dull most of the game is, it’s hard to recommend this. Fans of both Metroidvanias and retro platformers will simply find very little to sink their teeth into here, even if I did mostly enjoy the satirical dialogue, which is funnier than it needs to be.

A review more suited to the Metroidvania category:

Kotama and Academy Citadel PC review – Getting pacing down to a science |