God, it is sandbox games week for me, and the next I have is a really enjoyable one. Even for kids. Take what you know about spiders, and all you have to do is use your stupidly strong silks to move objects. Create an entire web in the room to travel easier.
One of the few caveats is that there are not a lot of playgrounds, it is early access so I can understand, but man, just from playing this with just having the ability to create webs alone, makes it a creative endeavor to achieve crazy things. Almost like it's an experiment of sorts, but it can also be A Webbing Journey. Not my best pun attempt, but I'll die on this hill.
You can even run this on your PC just fine without having a beefy setup. You can't avoid the motion sickness, though, and I've had issues with the controls at times.
- Arachnoid Adorable
At first, we start off with a tutorial, right before getting to it, the option to customize my spider offers plenty from showing the abdomen to changing their color for each specific part of the anatomy. Oh, if you're not a fan of spiders, you can just play them as a puff of ball.
It's afterward where you learn the 'ropes' of creating slings of web to grab, travel, and attach to objects to manipulate their positions. I like how it's your spider friends giving you simple instructions to pass through a number of things like the fans, and electrocuted surfaces. Harmless stuff, especially if all is taking places in the ventilation.
All it took was a matter of getting used to, simply shooting web just grapples me to the closest surface regardless of where it's facing, and just swing away with the right trigger. Left trigger easily creates a web line from my surface to the target. B cancels them out.
Next thing is tricky, you have directional webs which are created based on where you point, and then there's anchor webs, where they originate from one place. Turns out, being a spider is a very task heavy and imaginative job, and I barely got around to figuring it out. There's more to learn, one of my pals taught me that I can attach any object to my both simply pressing both triggers.
The first area was a kitchen and there was a big to-do list, some of it was easy like putting an acorn inside a microwave oven to make popcorns, turning on the radio, literally dragging a bar of soap to clean the floor, there's a sense of quaint, endearing fun in doing these silly tasks. That is, until I had to lift a freaking blender off a cabinet to the top, and get it to destroy three different food. You have to plug the damn things too, it's very specific and heavy duty.
Like dude, I'm an itty bitty spider, not a construction worker or working a forklift. But this taught me a few things, one was how I needed to use the slingshot webs, to create a network midair. That's how webs are made, why didn't I think of that? It's literally on the poster art.
It was utterly confusing and overwhelming, even more so, I was told to make a pizza, how am I supposed to do that? There's already one on the table, I'm supposed to put whatever ingredients in the skillet, and see what happens? Thankfully, I didn't have to do that, I ticked enough boxes, missing out 4 of the tasks to unlock the next level. The Office and after that was Kid's Room.
- Working ends meet
What I like about the next level is that, it ditches the repetitive, task heavy stuff, and just straight up go to solving problems using thinking skills. I had to figure out how to open a safe, using the information on the pinboard. Before that, I played around a bit.
There are so many activities to do, it just embraces the whole sandbox thing, and lets you go wild. I even engaged in a race, where I was swinging like Spider-Man and failing half the time to beat the time trial record. I still haven't gotten the hang of the controls, and I make mistakes at times.
I don't believe every part of the game mechanics is perfect, but it's far from being broken and unplayable. The camera kind of obscures the view whenever objects come in-between, that increases the vertigo and motion sickness for me. Also, where's the ability to rotate my spider while flying about? Ok, maybe that's just my idea for it, but there's nothing much else past the basic stuff.
I can see where the early access is going to help, the fundamentals are sound, and I like how it forces you to think and improvise around the environment to finish those tasks. I did the kitchen level in a mere 1 and half hours. The other spiders make for nice distractions, sometimes providing good tips too. Fun game, I'd wait for the content.
Above screenshots and GIFs are from personal recordings only
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