The Bradwell Conspiracy
iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Developer A Brave Plan
Publisher Bossa Studios
Format iOS (tested), PC, PS4, Xbox One
Release Out now
There’s nothing worse than wasted potential. The Bradwell Conspiracy had all the promise of a solid puzzle-adventure: a team of triple-A veterans and BAFTA luminaries behind it, and a killer key mechanic. In Bossa Studios’ latest you use a 3D printer gun to transform ‘substance’ into corporeal objects and solve puzzles. Well, sometimes. The ability is woefully underused throughout the game’s brief runtime. It’s also poorly and unoriginally implemented. Indeed, the overall impression is of a game whose thrilling concepts proved too complex to execute properly.
The Bradwell Conspiracy has serious problems, then, but you wouldn’t know it from the first hour or so. The explosive introduction is captivating: you wake up in a Brutalist, beautiful bomb site, a museum blown to bits. Soon, you find a fellow survivor, Dr Amber Randall, and join forces to find an exit. This involves exploring the shady underground headquarters of Bradwell – and completing a humorous employee introduction tutorial voiced by Jonathan Ross.
The assumption, naturally, is that the simple tutorial puzzles (print a key for a lock, print wooden planks to cross a gap) are but a taste of the inventive scenarios to come. Not so. In a world where you could theoretically print anything and combine things to make unorthodox solutions, A Brave Plan only ever asks you to print long, flat objects to cross gaps, highly specific objects for highly specific slots, or pipes to reconnect plumbing. The process of lining up each object you print is fiddly and imprecise. And finding substance is also a chore: only a few random objects in each section can be sucked up and reconstituted. We spend a long time searching in one level, pointing our reticule at every single bit of clutter in sight, before finally finding our culprit – a surfboard, of all things.
It’s a similar story with The Bradwell Conspiracy’s other potentially intriguing mechanic. You can only communicate with Dr Randall via snapshots taken with your ‘Guide’ glasses. The premise, again, is more interesting than the reality. Dr Randall essentially acts as an overblown hint system; the majority of the time, she’ll respond with confusion unless you’re photographing something specifically to do with a puzzle. Her ambient chatter, meanwhile, repeats so often that it’s grating.
Still, it’s more entertaining than the story, a flimsy shade of the sort of mass-mind-control cliché we’ve heard a thousand times before. The puzzles only get more protracted and banal as the narrative drags on – when we’re having to quit so often to deal with bugs, we more than once consider not loading the game up again. This is bafflingly below par for an experienced bunch. But perhaps there is no great conspiracy here: this simply has the air of a development team biting off more than it could chew.