Laraan
Developed by Flynn’s Arcade, Laraan begins with a religious tale of how God regrets his decision to create humanity due to their penchant for violence that has corrupted the Earth. You play as Zoah, whom God has tasked with finding the 8 Golden Stones. It’s a fairly simple premise, and one that leaves you to find your way pretty quickly.
Aside from the intro there is very little in the way of a story, instead having a distinct focus on the cinematic style of older games with a lot of zooming and cutting, and not much else. The camera angles can make for some quite awkwardly hilarious issues, particularly when in segments involving skydiving or riding a motorbike, and when trying to frame the camera just right to pull off a jump on the first try it can make for a frustrating time. For the most part you’ll find yourself walking - or running, since the walking is slow - from place to place as you hunt out the Golden Stones, but on the occasion you get to ride the futuristic space-bike, it serves for a nice - if brief - change of pace.
Done in a low-poly art-style, the game caught our attention as it’s actually very visually appealing. The limited colour palette further adds to this very minimalistic style which whilst done well here, doesn’t help with the overall blandness of the game. If there was more going on elsewhere, the colour palette would have been something nice on its own, but combined with the lack of story and everything else here, it kinda compounds the tediousness of it all. Having a very sci-fi feeling soundtrack works well with the style of game, however it is also quite bland in terms of a video game soundtrack - something giving more urgency or more of a feel of wonder may have worked better here, but again that could be mostly down to the lack of activity.
I only came across one enemy in my time playing Laraan, which made the world feel even more barren than its empty surface conveys. It feels like a half-game, a game that the developer wanted to be done with so much that they shrugged their shoulders and walked away from as soon as they had the skeleton in place. Expanding upon the core idea, and giving the world more love and more interactivity, and more life would have improved things tenfold. As it stands, it just feels unfinished.
Controls are simply horrible, with running and jumping mapped to the triggers in the most unintuitive way possible. The jumping is bizarrely floaty, more than I think I’ve ever experienced before, making it very difficult to successfully make a jump on your first go. There could be good reason for this – are we on another planet and the gravity isn’t as strong? Or has the jumping just been done poorly? Walking is so slow that there is genuinely no need to ever stop running, aside from the struggles you may come across when the camera causes issues when you try to run in a particular direction.
The game only lasts a very short time, one hour at most, and throughout that hour you’ll find yourself baffled by many of the decisions that have went into it. There are vast areas of nothingness, and the majority of my time I found myself to actually be quite bored – which is a shame for a game of such a short length. It’s a very cheap buy, at less than a fiver on the Nintendo eShop, but the lack of any real direction to the game, and nothing to entice you back for a second playthrough just left me feeling a bit deflated by the whole experience. I genuinely feel that with a bit more work, we could have had something special here, as the visuals and the premise were enough to grab my attention, but with nothing to hold my attention it just falls flat.
In the end, we decided to give Laraan the Collecting Asylum rating of 4/10.
Have you played Laraan yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Flynn’s Arcade for the Laraan Nintendo Switch review code!
