Not the Robots Review

Not the Robots is a procedurally-generated-furniture-eating-stealth-sim. If this is a genre you’re not familiar with, that’s mostly because Not the Robots has invented it. For those that find the idea hard to picture,  think Monaco without the multiplayer element or Pacman with hiding instead of running and then replace the pills or cash with lamps, sofas and filing cabinets.

The two components of Not the Robots make for an interesting combination – at times they feel at odds with each other but on other occasions, it creates tense tactical moments. On the basic level you’re supposed to move through the stages, going all Hungry, Hungry Hippos on the soft furnishings while avoiding laser beams, drones and other nefarious traps. The contradiction comes in the fact that the office equipment that you’re gobbling is also the only thing blocking the lasers ready to cut you down and the line of site of patrolling bots; meaning that the closer you get to completing the level, the more risk you expose yourself to. As you progress, levels become more and more complicated introducing more enemies and more objectives: at first you’re only expected to wolf down so much upholstery, then you have to do that while also activating nodes; progress, and you're expected to ‘tag’ enemies forcing you closer to the danger and so on.

To help you along are a number of items of varying usefulness: pillars to help block you from view; invisibility which can keep you hidden for as long as you like but you can't move; the ability to break through solid walls etc etc. These items only recharge when you eat though, meaning that sometimes your gluttony needs to be reserved – save that room full of easy mahogany till you need it later. Each item is also tucked away in an anonymous box and to open it you have to permanently discard your current item, making for difficult decisions: discard the sometimes-useful item you've got and hope for something more effective, while risking picking up something useless. Once a level has been completed you can open ‘Bonus’ boxes which offer rewards such as extra item slots, scanners allowing you to see what’s in the item boxes or score multipliers.  

The multipliers feed into an unlock system which helps to assuage some of the rogue-like blues. Here death is the permanent kind, forcing you to start all over again from the beginning, losing all those precious invisibilities, multipliers and additional item slots. But when you die the points you earn are added to a permanent unlock system which introduces new or improved items. Extra points can be earned through hitting certain objectives: complete the level while taking no damage or consume every last article in the office. This coupled with the usual risk-reward gameplay of rogue-likes makes for some pretty compelling gaming.

That said – what the game offers in gameplay it lacks in polish. This game is ugly. Offices aren’t the prettiest things at the best of times but here the graphics look like they date back ten years, the art direction is dull and your robot lacks character which is quite frankly astonishing. Issac Asimov’s first Law of Robotics is that ‘all robots have innate character’ but Not the Robots somehow manages to circumvent this. The game tries to inject some personality through quirkiness – dry audio logs and random loading messages but it’s not enough.

Perhaps some of the reason why your robot lacks character is because you can barely see him, and for that, the camera is to blame. The game takes place in tight, densely packed rooms and corridors but uses an angled, overhead camera which is rarely practical and makes traversal of the levels a lesson in frustration; it is often impossible to read vital information, such as the enemy's line-of-sight or whether you’re fully in cover. This seems like a large oversight because when the main gameplay mechanic is ducking behind cover to hide, it’s essential that you can easily see the next spot to scamper to. Compounding this issue are the controls, which feel floaty and unresponsive. This seems intentional as it fits the design of the robot you play but it’s intensely irritating when you overshoot your cover or take that half a second too long to accelerate out of the way of a trap. It’s also fiddly trying to select the piece of furniture you want to chow down on, meaning that you often unintentionally expose yourself when you meant to only have a cheeky nibble. My final moan is experiencing a few crash-to-desktop bugs but those at least were few and far between.

Longevity-wise this is a good value for money investment: it’s procedurally generated for god sake! (though the environs don't change enough to keep it particularly fresh). On top of this the game includes varying difficulties and timed challenges, which you unlock through the main campaign. I found little satisfaction in the challenge levels myself, as they don’t feed into the unlock system of the main game but I’m sure the more structured challenge will appeal to some.