As you may have gathered if you’ve followed my reviews for quite some time, in general I’m a big believer in indie games that go their own route. Throw me something a little off-center and quirky, and in general I’m down to have a good time. That said, I’m even more driven by the belief that games need to get your interest, and have you firmly engaged pretty quickly if they don’t want a substantial number of players to start eyeing their backlog, waiting for things to step up. While I tend to believe that it’s vital to grab the player within the first 30 minutes, at least within an hour there needs to be some hook that will clearly incentivize continued play. While it satisfies the quirky end of the equation, in general terms I’d say OFF is one of those titles that struggles, if not fails, on the incentive end.

With its minimalist and yet colorful look, there’s no doubt that OFF is determined to simply go its own way when it comes to visuals. With some of its more notable characters and monsters looking quite nightmarish in their design, it does manage to grab your attention… and some of the dialogue similarly stands out from the norm as well. In terms of its puzzles, I’m a bit more torn. While there is absolutely a logic to them, often feeling distinctive from what you’d normally see, in some cases I ended up solving them through brute force and still couldn’t discern what the vague clues that were given were supposed to be telling me. I suppose I can respect the choice to test the player, but given that this is primarily an RPG, it also feels like a bit of a misstep.

While this doesn’t happen too often, I also feel like the marketing push for the game has done it few favors. I have no doubt that given how long ago it was originally released, and the fact that it likely served as a model for more notable recent titles like Undertale, that its look and style have been influential. But even with the various updates and additions that have been made to it for this specific release it struggled to keep my interest. The action-oriented nature of combat, aside from its general quirk and your ability to play the game in very different ways, helped to keep Undertale interesting on an ongoing basis. By contrast, the very regular combat you’ll be working through here is dull and listless, too often playing out the same way with the same enemies over and over again. 

Between the plain and forgettable combat and puzzles that seemed needlessly obtuse, slowing me down without feeling rewarding, I started thinking about how I could be better using my gaming time. Perhaps I tend to be too impatient for something in a game to start clicking, but when I’m an hour in and I’m much less enthusiastic about sticking with a game than when I started, something has gone wrong in the process, and that makes it hard for me to recommend it.