We had already been able to try the game on the sidelines of the French Direct AGM, as well as ask our informed questions to the team. But while Broken Lens is coming exclusively to PC via Steam this July 22nd, it's high time to give our final opinion on this unique title. Clean the dirty lenses of your glasses, moisten your lenses and let's meet a little robot who is endearing but has a slightly disjointed vision.
Test conditions: We have completed 100% of the 6 biomes offered by the game, on PC via Steam. However, we have not managed to solve all 5 of the promised secrets.
Lensy home phone
A storm hits a small robot that has just left the factory. A flash of lightning caught by its antenna causes one of its lenses to crack, thereby changing the vision of its left “eye”. This is the premise that begins Broken Lens. Probably to justify its adventure, the robot will go through different scenes trying to untangle the true from the false in what it sees through each of its lenses.
The principle of Broken Lens is therefore child's play: your goal is to find the ten differences between two images representing the same and unique scene that can be scrolled by holding down your mouse. In the image above, for example, you will need to identify (among other things) the water level of the water carafe at the very bottom.
Easy, you might say? If difficulty is important to you, don't worry, the developers of Team RUN have planned to make the game much more difficult as the levels make up the 6 biomes in total, a biome is only unlocked if you do something in particular in the game. We will voluntarily keep quiet here about the method for unlocking the 6th biome, which is more narrative by the way (with a “real” ending), allowing at the same time to drastically change the general colorimetry, staging or dramaturgy, by highlighting other characters who take on their full meaning in the overall adventure. A sort of very successful epilogue.
Although the structure of the game is still quite “school” by borrowing the same pattern throughout the 60 levels crossed, it is easy to get caught up in the game as the whole remains fluid, and even challenging. But the developers of Team RUN have thought of everything to give you the possibility of helping yourself in order to better cross certain tables that are not so big, adding dynamism to the whole.
Note for example the possibility of moving on to the next level as soon as 5 errors are spotted in a table. It is therefore quite possible to finish the game with “only” 250 errors found in the first 5 biomes, in a few hours therefore. You can also zoom in quite strongly to find the slightest little difference. But the final interest of Broken Lens is elsewhere since the game encourages you to continue your quest for errors by providing you with in-game help that allows you to surround an area on the stage where a new error is located. It is up to you to choose the size of the circle symbolizing the area to be studied, depending on your desired level of help, without any impact on obtaining achievements for example, and with a fairly significant latency time before being able to reuse it.
A ton of achievements will also be available to reward your actions ranging from using the in-game help (up to an achievement mentioning 2 aids maximum for the whole game!), to finding all the lost pages of a book or discovering all the errors. Take your time to find everything then, the software wanting to give pride of place to relaxation, to the restful aspect of a game come here to refresh your catalog for an evening or two.
Cultivating our differences
To reinforce this chill and relaxing aspect, you need to know that Broken Lens will not have any competitive mode, speed or minimum clicks to complete the levels. In other words, the only judge of peace in your game will be you, since there is no no game over, no timer, and no maximum hits allowed. The developers had expressed this desire to us (especially after the frenetic RUN: A World in-Between) in order to “remove any notion of stress, the goal [étant] to have fun and have a good time,” during our interview.
The only slight attention to the inadvertent clicks hoping to find an unseen error is the blurring of your vision by huge black ink stains (like Mario Kart to give you an idea), very easily erasable by passing the mouse cursor over it.
Although it must be admitted that the gameplay of Broken Lens is by definition very widely accessible, the same could not be said of the general understanding of the title. And unfortunately it is not the 50 pages of a mysterious book to find that help us more. Extraordinarily well hidden, especially in the last two biomes, these pages are in fact small drawings that ultimately reform a sort of totally cryptic journal, like tunic for those who will have the reference, explaining movements and other interactions to perform to uncover the ultimate secrets of the world of Broken Lens.
Because yes, where Team RUN shows us the extent of its talents is in the fact of having hidden no less than 5 secrets throughout the levels crossed. By manipulating the environment, melodies played on a strange piano, players will be able to learn more about what happened to the little robot through which we see the world, although we will have to admit not having managed to uncover all these secrets.
The fault lies in an understanding of the pages that is a bit too demanding and not explicit enough for our taste, which is really a shame when that's all it takes to finish a game 100%. In terms of regrets, we would have liked a little more renewal in the experience, such as a view that blurs unexpectedly, an inversion of right-left movements, etc., which could have made the experience even more dynamic without making it less relaxing.
Little robot will become big
Discovering the few screenshots that we share with you for this test, you may have noticed the unique graphic style of the title, very colorful, very inspired too, the settings and the colorimetry are frequently renewed between the biomes and sometimes in the biomes themselves. Although all these scenes are in a way freeze frames of a specific scene, we can easily feel the events taking place there, sometimes with a ton of robots, sometimes with mysterious creatures, mushrooms etc. An artistic ensemble that we owe to EncreMécanique, while the development of the game as such must be credited to Hephep, as far as the hard core of Team Run is concerned.
But the sound aspect is just as important in Broken Lenssometimes reporting very calm, relaxing music, allowing a real escape from everyday life, to more epic, more organic music, symbolizing the importance of the scenes playing out before us. This formidable auditory highlighting is due to a French composer too, Yomoeh, who will even offer you to play without “epic mode” in order to enjoy relaxing and captivating music all the way through. However, we must report one or two bugs in triggering this music, making us go through certain levels in a calm that is too… calm.
Bugs are ultimately quite few throughout the adventure, except for some latencies when loading certain levels, which is quite normal for a game at the end of development at the time of testing. However, the whole thing remains fluid, without any problem scrolling through the levels, which can also be viewed in their entirety in a gallery in the selection menu, to see the multitude of details in wide shots.
Finally, if you're wondering about the lifespan, count on about 5 to 6 hours to finish the game in a straight line with half of the errors found, 7 to 8 hours to see the end of the adventure with all 600 errors, and probably 10 to 12 hours to collect all 50 pages of the book and the 5 secrets. Enough to keep you going for two or three good evenings, while waiting, we hope, for a port on Nintendo Switch, which would perfectly meet this type of game.
Finally, note that we were not able to see the features of the Twitch integration that will be offered to streamers, to allow their community to help them in finding errors, or even to eliminate them, via votes on keywords. A welcome feature but that will have to be judged on the evidence at the release.