“I’ll leave my ball here, you anchor it, and pull me through below the roof. “
“Then you’ll open the small gate and hang your shackled ball on the right side of the roof.”
“Then you anchor your ball with my ball and swing in!””And get the coveted scarf!”
Degrees of Separation is a co-operative puzzle platformer for two or one players. According to the story Ember and Rime, the two characters you control, lived in their own little cozy worlds, happy with fire/ice related things, but one day they sensed danger around them and found other worlds in ruin. From here on the story becomes a bit fuzzy, there is a king, a dragon, and some magic ore involved. They should have named it A Song of Ice and Fire.
Ember is a creature of warmth, fire, and summer, while Rime is frost, snow, and winter. When they meet at the beginning of the game they realize that they are separated by a magical barrier. During the course of the game they fall in love and destroying this wall between them becomes their goal.
The core idea of the game comes from the clash of the two opposing environments. Your screen is constantly divided based on Ember’s and Rime’s positions and the world reacts differently on each side. For example, Ember can light up lanterns and they will move upwards, while Rime can create huge snowballs. Ember can thaw ice while Rime freezes water.
The Good
The game is visually stunning. Ember’s and Rime’s worlds are beautiful and the constant split of the screen looks absolutely gorgeous. As you jump around each other the split shifts as well, creating beautiful wallpaper-worthy screenshots.
The puzzles are also mostly fun. The majority has just the right level of difficulty, so you will solve them in a reasonable amount of time but still feel smug about it. Each level you explore will have a slight tweak to the core mechanism, like being able to cloak and enter each other’s worlds or solidifying the barrier between Ember’s and Rime’s environment. I can’t stress enough how much I enjoyed the puzzles, apart from one level which you can read about below in “The Bad” section.
One of the greatest features of the game is how the game guides without actually guiding you. There is no tutorial, you get some abilities and then the game lets you figure it out how to mix and match these. The game excels at allowing the players deduce what they can do in the game. For example, we know that water freezes around Rime. Simple mechanism, nothing to add. But in the level where Rime can suppress his environmental effects it also means that if Rime is standing at the bottom of the lake then Ember can jump on him, using the ice he generates for support. We felt really clever figuring it out.
The game is also uniquely designed for two players and more importantly it feels and plays very much like a couple’s game. The main heroes are a boy and a girl, who meet, fall in love, and want to figure out a way to overcome their differences and be together. Very romantic, so points for creating a game for this niche market. Of course, some people might find it too romantic, it is a bit much sometimes.
The Bad
The worst part of the game is the Scorched Earth level. I know, it is weird that the first bad thing about a game is a whole level, however, that area just sticks out like a sore thumb. The additional tweak for Scorched Earth is that if you go too close to each other the barrier explodes and pushes you far far away. For some of the puzzles this worked fine and it is an interesting mechanism. But, for a couple of the challenges you have to time these jumps and explosions so accurately that it turns this seemingly relaxing/romantic game into a huge ball of angst with both players getting close to smashing their controllers into the TV. You get into situations where you know what the game wants from you, you see the solution, but executing it the right way is just so annoyingly hard. The physics engine is just not good enough for this. Most of the puzzles require the characters to jump up and down on each other’s heads and that depicts the feeling of going through this level flawlessly.
We also got a couple of bugs in the game. The less game-breaking ones happen when you go too far from each other and just can’t see yourselves or the map properly. A worse one happened when a rope didn’t extend to the appropriate length during a co-op game, and we had to do that puzzle in single player mode.
The fast travel is a good feature to have, but it is executed in a very annoying way. You can become a little butterfly near monoliths and then you can pick a direction and it will take you that way. It is faster than walking, but it still scrolls through the whole area. At first, it seemed cute. Then we had to travel through 20 monoliths to get to the place we stopped last time and it felt less cute. It is also way too easy to accidentally launch yourself, so we had our fair share of “omfg I’ll be right back”-s.
The story feels weak and the theme is also sometimes weird. During the game you collect scarves. Why? I don’t know. I am okay with it, and we were obsessed with collecting all the scarves during the game but it feels out of place. Maybe it could have been snowflakes and cinders that can be used to warm up Rime and cool down Ember so they can touch finally. I don’t know what would have been the better solution, but scarves are not thematic at all.
I mentioned above how the game looks amazing and a game with such a unique and delightful visual style deserves a better soundtrack. I am especially sensitive to good music, I am willing to look past a whole plethora of mistakes as long as the music is great, but Degrees of Separation has very generic piano music. It is really nothing special, which is a shame. I wish they would have picked someone like Coeur de Pirate to score the game, she did an exceptional job with the music for Child of Light.
The Co-Op
It is a game designed for two players, so all the puzzles require co-operation. Sitting on the couch trying to figure out the challenges together is great. You jump around then start wrecking your brains over who stands where and how to combo your abilities and environments. It is very satisfying, and it really gives you a sense of achievement to get through the puzzles together.
The Recommendation
I would say this game is best for couples with the caveat that I don’t think this is necessarily good introduction to gaming. If you play games together, go for it, it is beautiful, fun, moderately challenging, and romantic. If one of you doesn’t play games regularly then this game might be a bit too hard.
Info
| Release Year | 2019 |
| Genre | Platformer, Puzzle |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Number of Players | 1 to 2 |
| Length | 5 hours |
Rating
| Overall | Good |
| Story | Mediocre |
| Co-Operation | Great |