Elementium: What You Find in the Depths of Steam’s New Releases.

Years ago I used to troll through the new releases section of Steam, looking for anything that piqued my interest. I played a lot of things out of my comfort zone and grew to enjoy the wide and varied experiences that the Indie scene brought to bear. Back then the signal to noise ratio was quite a lot higher, mostly because there were far fewer games released per week (it’s something like 200+ on average now). Those days were mostly gone however as I could usually find something on the first page of “Popular New Releases” section but last week I came up empty. Enter Elementium, the game that managed to catch my eye with its Talos Principle like visuals. It isn’t anything like that though, more akin to an alpha release of a Kickstarter game than a full release on Steam that the developer is charging $15 for.

Elementium is a physics based puzzle game where the main mechanic is where you can change the size of objects through the use of perspective. That’s pretty novel, indeed the tech demo of the Museum of Simulation Technology is the only other “game” I can think of that uses it, however that’s where the interesting part of the game ends. What follows is a series of 40 levels, most of which can be beaten on first try in under a couple of minutes. The others? Well they’re fiddly messes, either requiring precise timing (something you’ll struggle to get done due to the ham fisted nature of the controls) or doing things that have a high chance of failing which will require you to restart the level (which takes approximately 30 seconds to load every, damn, time). Honestly I was going to be kind to this game at the start but after 40 levels I’ve simply run out of patience.

It does manage to look good however I think that’s more a function of the Unreal Engine’s asset store more than anything else. The sound design is god awful with each sound always sounding exactly the same including very noticeable things like your character’s footsteps. Indeed anything without a smattering of glowy lights looks like something that was developed over 5 years ago with that telltale Unreal engine feel about them. Suffice to say the audio-visual experience isn’t going to save this game and, unfortunately, the overall game doesn’t do itself any favours either.

Most of the puzzles are so blindingly simple that you’ll often wonder if there’s some kind of hidden switch or alternate solving method to unlock a secret. There are none and it’s hard to see why the developer built most of the puzzles the way they did. For example there’s one puzzle with 3 boxes in a room and a laser stopping a door from opening. To solve it all you have to do is put one box in front of it, that’s it. What were the other 2 boxes for? Just fun decoration? When that first happened I thought, maybe, that was just an early test puzzle or something but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Instead there are numerous puzzles with extraneous items strewn about, never to be used for anything.

Crappy puzzle design would be one thing but the real irritation comes from interacting with those items. Picking up items can be a bit of a guessing game, often requiring you to get just the right angle on it to be able to pick it up. This because quite a chore when you’re working with big items as quite often you’ll be unable to put them down. The game says that the middle mouse button is the “drop item” button but it rarely works. What this often leads to is furious clicking as you try to figure out how to pick up and move stuff about often to no avail. Worse still the perspective/size mechanic works on items even after you’ve finished interacting with them. This is especially clear when you’re say dropping big boxes into holes as they’ll magically shrink as they fall down, even if you’re not looking at them.

The same feeling of extremely low effort applies to the other aspects of the game like the UI. Every element is simple text boxes, all of which will require at least 2 mouse clicks to register properly and even after you’ve done that it can be hard to tell if the game is actually doing anything. The final scene of the game is a simple portal that has 2 switches which, when pressed with the boxes, display the simple text shown in the screenshot below. This makes me think that at one point the game did have some kind of story, which might explain why there’s a pointless corridor walk at the start of each puzzle, but the developer simply didn’t have enough time to get it done before he shoveled this pile of crapware into the public eye.

This isn’t even a game where a few simple tweaks here or there would result in a game that I’d deem worthy of playing. Pretty much every aspect has to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch as there’s not one part of this game that doesn’t have some kind of issue associated with it. Visuals? Repetitive asset-reuse that makes every single level feel pretty much identical. Sound? That would require using more than a dozen sounds at a time. Mechanics? Every single one is implemented in a rudimentary, unoptimized way. Story? Don’t make me laugh.

Elementium is the kind of game I expect to see on /r/Indie where the developer doesn’t seem to understand why it isn’t selling. The fact of the matter is that this game barely qualifies as such, playing like an early alpha rather than a game you’re paying full price for. These are the kinds of titles that Early Access is designed to help, the ones where the developer has an idea they want to explore but hasn’t got a clue about how to make it fun. Further the extreme lack of polish on nearly all elements makes me think that this game didn’t see any external play testing at all as there’s no way any of these issues made it past even the most forgiving of family members. I tried to keep an open mind when I was playing Elementium, figuring that there had to be a point somewhere along the lines where it started to really come into its own. That time never came and here I am, 4 hours in the hole without much to show for it. Honestly Ignite Studios, if you’re reading this, email me: therefinedgeek@gmail.com, you sound like you need the help.

Rating: 3/10

Elementium is available on PC right now for $14.99. Total play time was 4 hours with 100% of the achievements unlocked.