“The uncanny valley” is a theory first proposed for robotics which says that after a certain point, the more human a thing looks the more unsettling it becomes due to a sense of “wrongness”; this theory has also been applied to increasingly realistic computer-generated images. “Uncanny Valley” is also the title of a video game from developer Cowardly Creations. Tonight we are going to be talking about the latter.
The story is the big selling point of “Uncanny Valley.” The basic gist of the game is that you play as a security guard named Tom; Tom got in some trouble back in the city and so he’s taken up a job as a nightwatchman at the abandoned offices of a robotics corporation out in the middle of nowhere. However, the real draw of the story is that it has several branching paths leading to multiple differences. You’re not going to see everything that the game has to offer in a single play. Each play through of the game is fairly short, lasting one to two hours. This actually works in the game’s favor a bit, since it’s not a huge commitment of time to sit down and play it a second or third time in order to find things that you missed the first time around. Some parts of the story are maybe a little too predictable, but overall it’s a solid story told in a pretty interesting fashion. More than that, it tells it in a way that only really works within the medium of a video game, so that’s pretty cool.
The graphics of “Uncanny Valley” are not going to trigger its namesake reaction. Instead of shooting for realism, it opts for pixel graphics. I don’t really care for the game’s particular approach to pixel graphics, where some objects are rendered with a lot more detail than others. I feel like this makes the whole thing look a little slipshod. However, the designs for a lot of things, like the robots and surreal elements of the dream sequences, are fantastic. So if there had been a little more effort put into unifying the art style it probably would have looked great instead of looking pretty good.
“Uncanny Valley” makes some decisions about sound that utterly confuse me. Some of the game’s dialogue is voice-acted, but other parts are just thrown up on screen as dialogue. The dialogue that’s just text is accompanied by a really annoying typewriter sound-effect. The actual music is pretty good, though. I very much appreciate how different situations have vastly different styles of music associated with them. Weird choices about dialogue aside, a lot of care seems to have gone into how this game should sound, and it really pays off.
The actual gameplay of “Uncanny Valley” is, sad to say, the game’s weakpoint. There is an awful lot of very repetitive walking down the same few hallways. For some reason, you need to turn your flashlight back on every time you walk onto a new screen. Use and pick up are mapped to different keys for some reason, instead of the industry standard of mapping them to the same key. It feels like the developers got so caught up in making sure that the branching story worked well that somewhere along the lines they just kind of forgot about making sure it was fun to play.
“Uncanny Valley” is pretty far from perfect. However, there’s still an awful lot to like about the game. It’s $10 price tag is maybe a bit too steep for a game this short and with so many stumbling blocks. However, when it goes on sale on Steam you can pick it up for just a couple bucks, and it’s definitely worth that much.
You can purchase the game on STEAM here.
