Desert Child
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Remarkable though it is when one person makes a game all by themselves, every so often we’re reminded of the benefits a larger team can bring. Differences of opinion prompt compromise and, often, improvement. Desert Child is one such game. Oscar Brittain has dreamed up and pulled off this hoverbike adventure alone. He’s come up with an intriguing world, rendered it in wonderful pixel art, has written the code that holds it all together and appears to have composed almost all of the soundtrack, albeit under a number of aliases. It is a confident work with a wonderful sense of style. Unfortunately, it’s not much of a game.
The core mechanic is pleasing enough initially. Desert Child is built on a series of two-minute hoverbike races set to pulsing faux-’80s electro. It’s notionally a 1v1 racing game in which you can fire bullets at or ram your opponent to slow them down, or use a recharging boost to zip past them. Along the way, floating TV screens can be shot down to reveal cash, boosted into to top up your ammo, or simply ignored in the hope of letting them cause problems for your opponent.
Brittain finds plenty of ways to riff on this formula. You hunt down bounties for the cops, the aim being to destroy your opponent’s bike rather than beat them over the line, the payout larger the more quickly you get the kill. An apprentice wants to run with you to improve their skills, and will pay for the privilege. You herd kangaroos, trying to keep behind the pack to avoid losing any stragglers. You deliver pizza. And down an alley in the nightlife district, a mobster wants you to throw a race, hack the local bank, or disrupt races by side-ramming vehicles. If that seems like a lot to do, well, we’re sorry for misleading you. These are minor mechanical deviations on a single idea whose central premise is neither strong not satisfying enough to carry a whole game. There’s little else to do that isn’t in service of a core mechanic that quickly loses its lustre.
It’s something that’s made clear within the first half-hour. You start in a small town on a dying Earth, and are told to raise a few hundred dollars so you can get your backside to Mars. It’s easily done, and you quickly find yourself on the red planet, wandering an attractive seaside town. It’s bigger than the one you’ve left behind, but there still isn’t much there. You start to piece the town, a stitched-up series of single-screen streets, together in your mind; the protagonist moves at a trudge, so it’ll take longer than you’d like, but you’ll get there eventually. You’ll win a few races, netting a couple of hundred dollars at a time. You’ll bring down a few bounties, maybe throw a race or two. They all bring in about the same amount of cash. From the minute you land on Mars, you have only one goal: raise the entry fee for the hoverbike grand prix. All $10,000 of it.
That’s a lot of races, and you’ll need to win even more of them because just about every other system in the game is designed to slow your progress to that lofty financial goal. Between races you need to keep tabs on your hunger level, since it affects your performance on the bike. Prices aren’t kind, with one restaurant offering pizza and wine for $80 and even ramen dishes setting you back $15 for a meagre reduction of your hunger stat. Your hoverbike will need repairs, courtesy of vendors charging infuriating prices: $45 for a 20 per cent fix, or $100 for a full one. You’ll find out the hard way that the local law are keeping an eye on you; feel a hand on your shoulder and fail the ensuing chase, and you’ll be fined thousands. A bank across the harbour will keep your cash safe, giving you yet another reason to criss-cross the town at a snail’s pace between races and odd jobs.
All this pain can be offset, somewhat, through bike upgrades, which despite being unfathomably poorly explained and clunkily implemented is one of Desert Child’s more successful elements. Bike parts can be stolen, via a hacking minigame, from other bikes around town, or bought at chop shops for what initially seems like an eye-watering $600 apiece, though they’re worthwhile, if not quite essential, investments.
You apply these upgrades using a puzzle system that owes a debt to Resident Evil 4’ s suitcase inventory: not only must you find a way to make these awkwardly shaped doodads fit in the puzzle space, but all must be connectable to a central battery using power cells. You’ll cram as many power cells in to the remaining gaps as you can, and then, in a different menu, assign them to the upgrades you’ve installed to increase their power. Your bullets get bigger, your ammo capacity too; TV screens spit out more dosh when shot, or give more ammo when rammed. The whole thing is powered by baffling menu screens, sadly, and you’re only ever one errant button press or stick flick from resetting the whole thing. Once you get your head round it, though, it’s the most satisfying part of the game.
It’s all rather moot, however. Yes, you can hurry things along a bit as you work towards that $10,000 goal. But every task in this part of the game can be completed without a single upgrade in place. Races employ ludicrous levels of rubberbanding: boost ahead and your opponent will be right on your tail, but take it slow and they’ll do the same. Only once we’ve finally saved up the grand prix entry fee do the upgrades start to feel necessary. Suddenly the game starts to expand and deepen, its systems starting to make sense, and races paying out in the tens of thousands, atoning for the miserly early grind. And then, within minutes, it’s over, the credits suddenly rolling out of nowhere. It’s an abrupt, jarring ending – as if Brittain got bored, and decided to draw a line under it. Fair enough: we also tired too soon of a game that, while dripping in style, is miserably lacking in substance.
Just about every system in the game is designed to slow your progress to your lofty financial goal