It’s weird to see such disparity between some parts of the game which look amazing, and others where it doesn’t look finished. Seren.exe moves with a clunky walk cycle to the point where she looks downright silly. The 3D models and animations are the weakest part of Master Reboot. But art styles are subjective, so the cutscenes and overall art style may appeal to you. They are relevant to the plot and help clue you in to the story, but they feel crude for the most part. But in this case they don’t even animate, rather slowly panning static images. The visual novel style cutscenes aren’t my cup of tea and are in stark contrast to the game’s art style, in the same way that the animated cutscenes from Mirror’s Edge felt flat and out of place.

It’s not to say all of the textures are low quality, but it’s inconsistent throughout the game. Master Reboot’s best looking levels were its more abstract ones, where they felt almost minimalist. It truly is a mixed bag from a visual perspective, but overall I found the look to be appealing and suitably dream-like. The overall quality of the textures is low, while the more visually impressive levels hide in great lighting and shadow effects. The levels vary from truly beautiful, to super plain. The game is built on Unreal 3 engine, which is a solid base for an FPS. Not particularly clever, most of the time it’s nonsensical. For example, I was in a playground where I pushed a yellow cone into a tree, which caused a crow on the tree to shoot a comically large laser out of its beak to destroy a jungle gym containing a required piece of the puzzle. The puzzles aren’t particularly satisfying or clever, but some are just downright stupid.

She’s effective in making me panic in the same way that the monsters in Amnesia do as they stalk you. She exists mostly as a puzzle element or jump scare fodder.

She hunts you down over the course of the game because she considers you an invader to the system. Who’s out to kill you? The omnipresent antivirus Seren.exe, aka the glowy-eyed young girl on the cover. Death isn’t penalised your character just ‘reboots’ and you start the section over again. The gameplay consists of basic puzzles: find this thing, put that thing here, super simple stuff. The hub world is visually striking and completing each level adds objects to the hub world that were present in the memory you just explored. The levels are fragmented memories of her past, ranging from childhood to experiences in school and young adult life. In Master Reboot, you play as a young Welsh woman trapped in the Soul Cloud, a large digital world where dead people’s memories are stored for family members to relive memories with the deceased members of their family. There’s fifteen dollars worth of content here, but it’s probably worth waiting for a Steam sale to pick it up. Master Reboot is a psychological first person puzzle game developed by Wales interactive. One of my favourite things about first person 3D games is exploring a world through the eyes of the protagonist, especially when it’s a visually interesting dreamscape like Master Reboot.

Prius master reboot