Artistic games are not the easiest thing to do, and many have sought to make an opus but instead fell far short. I feel like North is one of the latter categories, as it was clear that the developers had a vision for the game that simply did not pan out the way they had intended it to.
North is about a man seeking asylum in a city full of strange creatures and customs, where he is utterly different and a complete outsider. Obviously this is meant to tie into the ongoing situation with refugees and tell such a story with a dash of cyberpunk, but there is a major problem holding the game back. That problem is: the game is simply not very good. The visuals are far too dark and I honestly couldn’t had trouble telling what some things were, This isn’t too mention that the visuals were also very blurry at times, which again contributed to an experience that was incredibly lacking.
The game is intended to be played all at once, and only taking about an hour to play, but after only a few minutes I became frustrated. It seemed that the game was being prolonged artificially and that is never a good thing. The game takes a while to load, controls are not fully responsive and so on. You cannot focus on artistic quality if the game itself is not well designed. What will happen is that people will see a flawed game for its poor design and not an artistic game for the message it wants to bring.
I realize what the developers were going for, but the end result is far from satisfactory. I cannot recommend this game at all, and strongly urge people to avoid it. It had good intentions, but that isn’t enough to make a good game.
Disclaimer: A review code was provided