Completely invalid | Review – An Italian in another world?

Since then, thanks to the advancement of the genre and the medium, many similar titles have gone unreleased: OutOfTheBitone Italian studies based in London, has therefore thought about bringing it back to life and paying homage to it with his latest work: Complete emptiness.

Let’s find out together whether the authors succeeded in their plan and whether it deserves your attention, whether you are a nostalgic gamer or just very curious.

A dystopian world in ruins

Complete emptiness It doesn’t tell the player about its plot in words, only using the few details of its handcrafted scenario and occasionally some of the protagonist’s memories to guide them in reconstructing parts of the narrative.

But the only thing we really care about is that A crazy AI has taken over the world and enslaved all of humanity – or rather, almost all of itbecause a teenager is ready to rebel alone to defeat this unbeatable threat.

As we mentioned at the beginning, the gameplay is primarily intended to appeal to productions such as B. Pay tribute Another world (find it along with flashback on Amazonif interested): Complete emptiness features a graphic style entirely handcrafted in pixel artwith some sporadic cutscenes – which you’ll see mostly in “Jumpscare” on the occasion of your death.

That means that too The gameplay is deliberately much slower and more methodical: You must always be careful when descending from great heights, by hanging and letting go gently, carefully calculating every single jump and paying attention to the distance of our steps.

Also, from time to time you will find some small puzzles to solve: It’s nothing particularly complicated or what tempts you to look for online travel guides but urges you to remain ever alert and understand how to continue your journey.

Just nostalgia?

From the point of view of presentation, we can only praise the work of OutOfTheBit: during our test We often felt like we were standing in front of a little video game gem of the pastthat we have only recently rediscovered.

The excellent graphical work as well as the implementation of the mechanics and even the decision not to really include anything that could explain the story more than necessary, it really reminds us of the video games of yesteryearIt at the same time shows enough detail to justify our adventure while stimulating the players’ imagination.

Unfortunately, we got that feeling Everything ended at the top: our proof for Complete emptiness in fact it held up just over two hours without really being able to challenge us deserves that name.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing considering that excessive difficulty levels can leave players impatient and put off if they’re unfamiliar with this type of game. The fact of the matter is that we would have liked to see a few more challenges, especially given the potential of a given game Skill – which we obviously don’t want to spoil – that’s our opinion It has not been used to its full potential.

We would also like to make a small clarification: although we mentioned the presence of “Jumpscare”, Complete emptiness It’s not really meant to scare players: the intention is just to offer a little bit of that voltagebut it’s a production you could possibly play with your family as well.

Or maybe lounging on a good sofa with gear like Steam Deck: after all, this is a light platformer that just wants to provide a healthy few hours of fun. Exactly and exactly how it was once made.