Metrico, from Dutch developer Digital Dreams, does something pretty strange - it presents a fascinating world consisting of mathematical graphs and financial reports. This may sound terrible for anyone who isn’t a business analyst or accountant, but I assure you it’s anything but. While it may sound like someone looked at an Excel spreadsheet and tried to make a game out of it, Metrico and its ever-changing landscape is a captivating and distinctive experience. Most of the time, at least.
This Vita exclusive plays a lot like other videogames in the 2d puzzle-platformer genre, which means you’ll be running in one of two directions, leaping between ledges and jumping over dangerous objects while attempting to work out how to solve its various spatial puzzles. Where things become a little more interesting is in how Metrico changes its levels (and rules) with animated infographics as you venture forward through its often tough levels. The developer has called this “Input Morphing”, and while it sounds gimmicky on paper, it makes more sense once you actually begin to play.
Metrico adds to its unique mathematical atmosphere and clean, minimalist visuals with a tranquil soundtrack and subtle effects. You’re encouraged by the game to play with headphones, and it’s something I’d agree with as the sound work is truly excellent, supporting the visuals perfectly and creating a much more fulfilling atmosphere and experience.
You start off with a silhouette of your avatar (male or female) standing in a plain white background. Nothing is explained to you, you simply have one option: move forward. Once you start moving, the world is built around you – out of nowhere you’ll see graphs, percentages, fractions and coordinates react and change depending on your actions. You really have to keep an eye on your surroundings, observing the changes and reacting accordingly, or else you’ll quickly find yourself failing and needing to restart.
In this way Metrico encourages you to experiment with its shifting world. Each puzzle is different and requires a fresh approach which keeps the game challenging (sometimes frustratingly so). The further you get the more Metrico rewards you with more complex abilities as well as new ways of making use of older ones – this is how Metrico provides you with a sense of progression.
Where Metrico loses a bit of its appeal is when you take a look at how Digital Dreams has made use of the Vita’s functionality – to the point where it feels awfully gimmicky. Nearly every single possible input on the Vita is employed. For instance, at one point it uses the rear camera and asks you to try and capture certain light and colors to progress. This is ridiculously impractical; at one point, I found myself running my home in an attempt to find something that was green (I ended up having to google the color on my laptop - I’m not a big fan of green). While it’s a nice thought, features like these aren’t always appreciated and detract from the experience – if I didn’t have my laptop nearby I literally wouldn’t have been able to play further. Elsewhere the front and rear touch screens are used, the microphone gets a look in, and the gyroscopic sensors get a work out. It often feels like these were shoehorned in for the sake of it, rather than feeling organic - and the lack of explanation at any point means you’ll sometimes find yourself twisting and turning your vita, swiping and blowing into the microphone just to work out exactly what you’re supposed to do. Sometimes the solution that will let you make progress feels obvious in hindsight, but too often it feels as though you’ve stumbled across it through sheer luck.
It all gets a bit exhausting after a while, and if the developer hadn’t taken such a kitchen-sink approach to using the available inputs of the handheld it’s quite possible that the game would have felt tighter and more focused as a result. Unfortunately, it often feels more like a technical demo for what the Vita is capable of than a game determined to be an enjoyable experience in its own right.
In the end though, despite these frustrations Metrico still holds up well. I would certainly recommend it to people who are familiar with the genre, but I’d urge you to keep an open mind and have fun with it – it does away with traditional hand-holding and encourages you to figure things out for yourself, and often falls onto the wrong side of being obtuse, but when it comes together there are plenty of the “eureka!” moments that we all know and love.
Original, atmospheric and stylish but also often frustrating and suffering from feature-creep, Metrico is something of a curiosity - but one that remains worthwhile and stands as another unique experience on Sony’s struggling handheld.
Oliver Zimmerman
Latest posts by Oliver Zimmerman (see all)
- Samsung officially joins the VR race - 3 September 2024
- New Dungeon of the Endless Screenshots - 3 September 2024
- Persona 5 coming to PlayStation 4 - 1 September 2024
