CO-OP: Decrypted Preview

CO OP: Decrypted’s premise is one that may sound a bit too familiar to players: two robots, with contrasting shape and colour, must cooperatively overcome a series of chambers, filled with physics-based puzzles. It’s no surprise that some of the comments on its Steam page mention Portal in some snarky way or another. Even the facility’s design is very evocative to those corridors we once visited in Aperture Science, littered with hovering antagonistic AI heads (oh Wheatley… *sigh*).

This game is indeed very Portal-inspired, but without portals. Instead, our two charismatic robots have complementary powers: the red robot gathers energy from localised sources and the blue robot releases it in form of a controlled explosion that messes up electronic systems and knocks down walls. And that’s as deep as the puzzles mechanics get, unfortunately. The game is reduced to moving boxes from one place to another, pressing switches and collecting keycards, especially in the first chapter, making everything quite repetitive. Once you progress enough, all puzzles turn out to be variations of the same one. Some of them adventure in 2.5D shenanigans, some involve exploding, some timing your jumps… but at the end of the day, there is little personality or innovation among levels, at least in the ones available so far in development.

CO-OP: Decrypted’s main flaw is precisely the lack of a set of mechanics flexible enough to allow for more complicated ones to take place, as a result of the combination of the basic ones. In Portal’s case, travelling between portals, preserving momentum and doing so in a completely 3D space was the key to always provide a challenge and a new take on the use of the basic set. In CO-OP: Decrypted, long live monotony. The mechanics are not flexible enough to have you engaged for the entire duration of the levels, and the side-scrolling perspective constrains level design possibilities. Puzzle solutions are easy to find, but physically solving them is quite annoying. As you advance, most tasks become a chore, as you’ve already done them a few times each, particularly given the often-required precision and the slow, clunky, sometimes unresponsive and not-so-precise movements the robots have. This is, however, likely to be improved as the game gets polished.

Nevertheless, I must admit that a great deal of my criticism stems from playing a game that includes the word ‘co-op’ in its title mostly by my own. When in single-player, you still control both robots, alternating between them to interact with the level. Oh boy, is this confusing, especially since both robots interact and live constantly in different rooms. However, multiplayer did change things, as it does in many games. As of the writing of this article, there is no online cooperative multiplayer implemented, and the developers seem to have little intention to add it. Split-screen multiplayer, although being arguably more fun than loneliness, has its major flaws. The aforementioned geographical separation between the two robots is one of the biggest.

Admittedly, at some points, you can swap the robots and the room they’re in, but this adds more to the intricacy of the puzzles, rather than to the cooperative effort to be put into the game. As the red robot, I always felt alienated from my blue significant other. We never shared the same roof, and every cooperation could be done discretely, reducing the actual communication to the instances my buddy and I agreed on swapping rooms. Elements in each room activate some in the other one, but this generally barely needs any coordinated effort. Having said this, it is true that upping the pace of the game, by taking less time to solve the puzzles, makes the game much more enjoyable. Fast pace is not necessarily good in many games, but it certainly helps whitewashing elements such as the lack of engaging story or conveying visual design.

In CO-OP: Decrypted, we’ve already seen most of the features in other games, and the new ones that it brings to the table are not particularly well executed. Pixelz Games are lately updating the game, and they’re fairly committed to solve any issue you may have via Steam or Twitter, so it’s definitely likely to be improved. You will have a fun time with a friend if you get hold of it, but I don’t think you will, in five years, have a sit with him/her by the sea and reminisce about the adventures, and the ups and downs you experienced in CO-OP, with a good cold beer in your hand. You probably won’t even talk about it in the pub either.