Supraland (XB1) Review

I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD LIKE THIS GAME MORE, BUT I DON’T.

This whole experience is a bit weird so excuse me while I explain my history with this game.

I bought this game years ago on Steam, and for some reason never played it. I know I bought it because it seemed to be following in the footsteps of Metroid Prime,which is very uncommon, and I love Metroid Prime.

So cut to me getting the Xbox One copy for review I was finally given a reason to play Supraland. I was excited. However, the DLC was only available on PC, so thinking it was connected to the story I played the PC version and then compared it to the Xbox One version. They are on par with one another, and jumping between the two was easy for me because I played the PC version with an Xbox controller. The DLC is actually another option in the main menu of the PC version so I actually didn’t have to play the PC version at all. Just note that there’s no real difference between the two.

PLATFORMS: PS4, SWITCH, XB1, PC
MSRP: $19.99
PRICE I’D PAY: I honestly don’t have a price I can recommend

So Supraland is indeed a pretty well made Metroid Prime-like game while also taking clear inspiration from Zelda and Portal as well. They even admit to this on their site. The game takes place in first person but has melee combat as well as gun combat. It works better than it sounds, but don’t expect mind blowing battles to occur. The platforming even feels good, and there’s a fair portion of it. I am impressed with the core gameplay and the amount of exploration it has; the puzzles I will get to later though.

The story is that the Reds have had their water stolen by the Blues. It’s basic but the core conceit to Supraland is that this is a child playing out this story in his sandbox. In certain scenes the child can be found looking in on the action as if god to the world (it is even implied in certain dialog with NPCs). It’s an interesting take, and I think that because all of this is supposedly a child playing in his sandbox it makes the memetic humor and all the references to pop culture make sense and not feel as cheap as it does in other games. When playing with my toys as a kid I absolutely did the same thing. I won’t say it was all great (a clear Trump reference talking about grabbing things) but they also weren’t Duke Nukem Forever levels of cringe.

I do wish the idea of this world being miniature was played with more however, because all the NPCs are clay (?) cutouts that resemble the man on the men’s washroom sign and all the enemies are either small skeletons or lava monsters. It just seems weird that the conceit is that this is all happening in a sandbox but outside of the plot the game really doesn’t play with that except for the occasional real life object like a saw sticking out of the ground. There’s even a fight against a boss called the Rattler which I was hoping was a snake but it was just a bigger skeleton dude… yay.

Anyone who likes Metroid Prime or Zelda would probably love this game so far. I sure did. The puzzles on the other hand go from fairly good to absolutely unfair very quickly.

Remember how I mentioned Portal? Supragames mentions that on their website about this game, and clearly they took some inspiration but it feels like they understood how a puzzle should work mechanically but not how it should be presented. Portal, for those who have not played it or don’t remember, doesn’t start by giving the player the portal gun. It takes its time and slowly teaches how portals work, and once that has been grasped the game then gives the player only half of the portal gun, which means the game is still doing half of the work. It slowly eases the player into using those mechanics and learning how to use them in different ways. Later the player starts doing all the work, and because of how the game introduced those mechanics the player feels smart and has what is called the “a ha moment” when they solve the puzzles. At rare times Supraland seems to understand this, but most times it is clear the developers did not.

Early on a character talks about making a juice to give the player some sort of health upgrade. This NPC needs water and leaves. Well, the water is collected via a sponge which visually looks like a sponge and should make sense to the player… but the leaves are nowhere to be found. Everything with some importance is usually picked up by the player but in this case I could not find any leaves. The solution is to hit the tree with a sword so the leaves from the tree fall off and into the barrel to make the juice. This is a sidequest in the first area of the game. This is a mechanic used multiple times. This is the status quo for a fair portion of puzzles in this game. I had to look that up later on in the game when I was trying to color something green and there’s a lot of questions asking for help in portions of this game which makes me feel less stupid, clearly showing that the puzzles are not built in a way that teaches players well. Why would anyone hit a tree? The game has not told me to do that at any point.

A similar situation happened later in the game where I was stuck trying to get out of an area and I had essentially solved the puzzle but was missing one single part: a sponge. The sponge was placed on top of a bookcase in a house. Not once in this whole game had I needed to check the top of a bookcase for an item. The house is so small there’s little reason to look upwards. My focus in the house is on the NPC who is talking about a sidequest in the area which I also couldn’t solve, and the reward for solving that puzzle was the advice that sponges filled with water can conduct electricity. Had that NPC said “Take my sponge.” I may have looked for it, but because nothing drew my eye up to the sponge I didn’t notice it and figured I had to be missing something else. This game is horrible for diverting attention to things that don’t matter making it seem like the puzzles that are required for progression are actually side puzzles. The emphasis is so poor on what I should be doing I would just aimlessly wander trying everything I could think of with what the game had shown was possible.

As the game developer Supragames is making the rules and I, the player, am following them,they need to teach me how to play their game otherwise I won’t know what to do and I won’t want to play. Pavlovian response is basically how game design works, and this game just seems to ignore that. There’s almost no feedback and I just wander around the same area for an hour trying to figure out what I am missing.

I think the biggest issue is that clearly the developers knew what they were creating when they made the puzzles and expect players to be able to think like them. It’s easy to make a puzzle, it’s hard to make a puzzle in a way that makes sense to someone else who has no concept of the solution. I played through a large portion of Portal with the commentary on after I was done and clearly a lot of playtesting went into the game which I do not expect Supragames to be able to afford, but I know that some puzzles were reworked in Early Access which makes me wonder what they were like before.

If I come off angry it’s because clearly the developers of Supraland know how to make a great game, but I grew so tired of the more obtuse puzzles that I got to the volcano and quit. It just wasn’t fun anymore. In conclusion it’s the puzzles being such a big focus of this game but seemingly such a small focus of the development that I can’t recommend this game. Sure, others might get a kick out of it, but to me it doesn’t work as a puzzle game, the combat isn’t there enough to really comment on outside of it being okay, and the exploration is hampered by the puzzles so ultimately Supraland is a puzzle game that doesn’t really work. When the puzzles are good they still aren’t great, and that’s unfortunate.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.

Good
  • Great visual design
  • Love the concept
  • Controls really well
  • The magnet belt is one of the coolest power ups
  • Exploration and platforming is fun
Bad
  • Combat is sort of boring
  • Some writing is just not good
  • Puzzles are obtuse
  • Unclear direction for players
5.5
Mediocre
Written by
Anthony is the resident Canadian. He enjoys his chicken wings hot and drinks way too much Coca-Cola. His first game experience was on his father's Master System and he is a loyal SEGA fanboy at heart.