Roll up, roll up. The Horror Show has trundled miserably into town once again with a Welsh psychological horror game in tow. just in time for Halloween.

Master Reboot, available now on Steam, is a self-proclaimed first-person psychological puzzle adventure game which delights in disorientation. The inquisitive protagonist finds herself trapped in a virtual world of demonic teddy bears and giant rubber duckies, and it’s up to the player to piece together who they are, where they are and why they find themselves in such a strange predicament.

Social media has infected every nook and crannie of society, and continues to grow day in, day out, to the extent where if Facebook crashed for a single day, there’d be an anarchic mass of people rushing through the streets poking each other and yelling about One Direction. Thematically, Master Reboot takes the familiar concept of rampant social media and pushes it to the absolute extreme. It’s the future, and the latest social media craze is ‘Soul Cloud’. The idea is that when a loved one passes away, their memory can be uploaded onto the Soul Cloud, subsequently being preserved forever. The living can then enter the virtual world and visit the dead, sapping the sting out of bereavement. The protagonist finds herself dumped into the Soul Cloud with no adequate explanation of why. She then has to relive memories in order to piece together who she is.

Each memory usually contains an arbitrary number of fairly simple puzzles for the player to solve before they are allowed to continue. The puzzles can be anything from pressing several switches in a dark environment to open up a door, to putting the planets of the solar system in order. The game play feels a little uninspired and is often poorly implemented, such as with the planets puzzle. The planets are so vague and similar that it’s hard to tell the difference between them, which makes a simple puzzle frustrating. Some levels involve jumping platform puzzles, which are always annoying in first-person. On occasion, Master Reboot also suffers from the standard adventure game problem of puzzles that don’t seem to follow any sort of logic. There is one puzzle set in a children’s park which involves rocking three sinister looking rocking-horses at once to power up another rocking horse, which then fires lasers from its eyes and knocks down a triangular shape which looks like a cheese wedge from Trivial Pursuit, which then has to be put onto a roundabout with five other cheese wedges to progress to the next level. Without sounding too unprofessional, that’s bananas.

Without continuing to sound unprofessional, the puzzles aren’t the only aspect of the game that could be accurately described as ‘bananas’. The environments are a collection of psychedelic sci-fi nightmares. One second, the player is running through a neon tunnel being chased by a twenty-foot mechanical teddy-bear; the next second the player is driving into traffic down a busy road; the next second the player is avoiding murderous air hostesses on an aeroplane. The delirious confusion that comes with the ever-changing and inconsistent environments is probably where the game shines brightest. It’s hard not to be mesmerised by the cavalcade of wackiness that is left in Master Reboot’s wake. For some reason, rubber duckies play a massive part in the game. They appear in ever single level and offer extra information to the player about the particular memory they find themselves with. The more cynical among us might ponder whether the developers just felt they needed a gimmick, and rubber duckies won the vote because of ‘randomness’, but they certainly add character to an incredibly unique game.

Due to its unpredictable and often volatile nature, Master Reboot does manage to be unsettling. The developers implement juxtapositions expertly, such as in the childhood memory where the player is shrunken and has to explore a vast children’s bedroom with evil, mechanized teddy-bears lurking under the bed. However, the game fails to live up to its ‘horror’ label because it’s just not scary. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, there are aggressors in the game that can kill the player, but when they do, the death-animation is so tame it has no effect. Once the player realizes that death isn’t frightening, then consequently the enemies cease to be frightening. Secondly, the game employs some very cheap tactics in its attempts to scare the player. Each level has its own soundtrack designed to disconcert, and often the player will hear heavy footsteps from the environment around them. After the same footsteps have repeated themselves four or five times, the realization will dawn upon the player that the footsteps are just part of the soundtrack, which completely ruins any kind of impact they might have had. Basically, Master Reboot is filled with empty threats, and it’s relatively easy to call the bluffs.

Despite the horror deficiency, Master Reboot is a completely unique game which tells an interesting and sophisticated story embedded in an engrossing virtual world. It’s that most intriguing breed of game where it’s far from perfect, yet everybody should experience it. Everybody should plug-in to the soul cloud and realize the hideously ubiquitous direction social media is heading in. Incidentally, if you like this review, please share on Twitter and Facebook.

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