“Framed” is a brilliant experimental iPhone game, built on one incredibly genius design idea, but appears to run out of room quickly.
First off, I love the look and the style of this game. The character design is strong, given the room for detail is so light given their art style. The character animation is incredibly well-done. The music is incredibly appropriate, and often queues off of game events – play this one with the sound on if you can. The art style is fresh, with cool pastels that are totally appropriate for the game and make every screenshot identifiable at a glance.
The gameplay itself can best be described as spy noir meets Edge of Tomorrow. The game tells a narrative story, where you must correct the timeline by putting some events in the correct order. Rearrange, play movie, and see where you fail. The result is a relatively simple puzzle mechanic that delivers a slick, atmospheric story experience.
The downside: it’s really short. The game is beatable in about an hour, and as you play, you really get the sense that this is a limitation of how much content the game’s core mechanic can actually deliver. The game struggles with coming up with new twists and puzzles, and also struggles with how to provide enough in-context story cues that you feel you’re being challenged in new ways. One gets the sense that they hit a wall.
Mark Rosewater, the head designer of Magic: the Gathering, talks frequently about the concept of ‘design space‘. For example, how much space does a particular mechanic actually have to play. A mechanic that a ton of design space might appear in multiple magic sets, as the designers explore different ways the mechanic can interact with other core mechanics. One with very little design space is a mechanic that may appear on just a few cards in one set – either there aren’t enough ways to make playable elements different from each other, or there are concerns that stretching the mechanic too much will be overpowered and break the game.
‘Framed’ feels very much like a game that ran out of design space. While it’s a lovely experience, you get the same playing it as when you saw Speed and wondered how they could make a movie about keeping a bus moving for 2 hours. Or when you watched Prison Break and wondered how they’d be able to do a season 2. Which is to say, the game is going to need to break some new and interesting ground if it wants to give us a sequel.
Still, the game is a tight little interactive experience for your iPad, and it kept my family engrossed during three different playthroughs over Thanksgiving. For those wanting to try a truly novel little experience on their iPads, it really is well worth its relatively minute pricetag.
Zoë Quinn
Narrative Design Consultant
It’s worth pointing out that there’s been 25 years’ worth of published games that answer the question of narrative progress by shooting at whatever’s in your way. Not quite so much written or discovered about how you tweak comic page panels to progress a story. So maybe eventually people will figure out how to make this kind of storytelling work well enough for it to be copied by some other team.
Hmm that looks like a great realization of a choose your own story book, with given failure states. Must be a ton of work to do all those permutations of the story.
I guess the first and last panel are not able to be shift around, are they?
It varies from puzzle to puzzle, but in general, the first and last image are static.
Is there a version for PCs?
Does every game need a sequel?
(I guess marketing would say yes)
There’s something nagging at the back of my head about the mechanic (and a strange flashback to ‘The Adventures of Jane’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1kqO4nH8hA ).
I want to say it feels a bit like the ‘Rewind’ feature of the Prince of Persia Sands of Time (but I didn’t spend a lot of time playing it and it was a long time ago). You play so far ahead to see what happens and if it goes wrong you jump back to the last point you’d got it right. Or, as many other games use, a ‘save point’.
(Full disclosure, as I don’t have an Ipad, I just watched a longer clip of the game on YouTube to get a feel for it. As with most games it’s bound to be more engrossing if you are actually involved in the decision making yourself.)