Corpse of Discovery (PC) Review

“Greetings Major” -A.V.A.

Corpse of Discovery starts out with a choppy video of a corporate representative giving a press release. Talking of how communication has been lost with an astronaut on mission to a distant planet. Cue the player. Corpse of Discovery is a single player exploration game, that explores not only the worlds outside of our own, but the effects we have on our own.

You wake up inside a small lab, on an unknown planet. No explanation of how you got here. You begin to fumble around, checking out everything in the lab: children’s drawings, coffee pot you won’t use. Even the treadmill that scientists have told you to use to keep up your strengh, but you never will. You make your way around until you learn your mission and find your spacesuit. You have been tasked to place beacons that will mark locations for the boys back home. All the while, you are accompanied by an AI, A.V.A. A.V.A. tells you about what your mission is, how you should feel for taking such a brave mission. Once you complete your mission, you are able to retire and go home.

We learn that the player has taken a job to explore new planets, before retiring and being able to enjoy his life with his family. Quite an ambitious undertaking: space travel is no small task, and the perils of which are greatly unknown. You manage to place your beacons, and then, are attacked by a large, dark, blurry flying cloud that drains your radiation shield, and causes you to black out. You come to, back in your bed in the lab, and start it all over. Somehow, the difference becomes that your environment has changed. Tall grasses, vibrant-colored plants. It looks like quite a serene place. And you’re back to hunting down markers, this time in the form of representations of wildlife that existed on Earth.

The visuals for this game are a bit deceiving. The game looks amazing. beautifully crafted planets are shown, but the glitches of gameplay easily draw your attention far from this. A majority of the rocks and plants you can run straight through, while what seems as only specific items are given any substance, and will halt you in your travels. If it weren’t for the fact that some of the geometry will actually impede your movement, the camera reminds you a lot of a fly-by camera: bring you close to the action, without actually having to be part of it.

The real frustration however was not the rocks you could walk through. Nor was it the plant life you could walk on. (yes, you can walk on certain plantlike structures). Or even the clunky feeling controls. The frustration was when on the second planet, I fell through the world! And this did not just happen once. I finally had to turn off the game for a while, after I had been progressing toward my latest beacon, only to fall through a whopping 5 times! I changed my routes, tried different things, even paid attention to see if I was walking through a stream, or not noticing a chasm somehow. But for all that I could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to where or why this was happening. I was able to return to the game, and make it to the marker ahead of me, but once I did, I shut it down. The damage had already been done.

Not much can be said for the audio of the game. multiple voiceovers from command, from A.V.A. and from holograms of family. Aside from that, you travel in all but silence, hearing your booster packs any time you decide to jump.

Personally, I do not see how anyone would wish to play this game a second time. The story is depressing, and while it does play as an open world, there is very little to actually do aside from finding your markers and evade that which can kill you.  If you wish to play this title again, more power to you.

FINAL THOUGHTS
You are greeted repeatedly by the above quote. “Greetings Major”. You endure this enough that you will find yourself looking in the options for volume settings, or ways to skip through the dialogue. A.V.A. was provided to you by your corporate overseers to aid you in your missions. More to the point, this AI will drive you crazy.

While the worlds look appealing, I will not be recommending this game to anyone. I can get by the ‘fly-by’ camera feeling. I put up with clunky controls, which had me hitting space three or sometimes 4 times before I would be able to jump. I seriously wonder if Phosphor Games put this item through a beta release, or just threw out the game like chum in the water. A disappointing thing indeed.

Corpse of Discovery is available on Steam for $14.99.