So the lovely @Left_Empty picked this up for me recently and I’ve been on a bit of a ‘short games’ spree so it was perfectly timed. Straight up: I wasn’t a big fan of Gravity Bone and much preferred Thirty Flights of Loving.
God, this was brilliant though. So much better than I was expecting. It’s been a long time since a game has so consistently surprised me mechanically, but it’s not just the mechanics: it’s the personality, intimacy and, yeah, as @Left_Empty said, the ‘warmth’ of the experience and the environments. This is way more game-y than Gravity Bone and Flights but it hasn’t lost those cool cuts and time shifts and the clever hands-off narrative. It’s so lean.
Spoilers from here on out.
The structure of the game is wonderful with the VR simulated rehearsals of each heist. You never actually do the real heists yourself and I love that so much. This means that things like noclip and determining insertion and extraction points, quickly exiting and restarting are liberating but make sense, and dying and triggering alarms don’t come with the usual disappointing baggage of other heist/stealth games. It’s a great way to integrate time leaderboards too because why wouldn’t you try to get the job done as quickly as possible? It’s training.
The VR environment also meant that all the bugs I encountered made some sort of sense as well (you name them, I had 'em. Items disappearing through the floor, my character getting stuck, black screens, bizarre deck behaviour when cycling commands, stickynote glitches, missing scores, catastrophic falls I didn’t make and couldn’t overwrite, respawn bugs, full blown crashes, warping across levels, achievements failing to trigger (apparently I didn’t complete the first two heists)). This is one of the buggiest games I’ve played in a while and I’m thankful that the homebrew software simulation within the fiction sort of framed it all.
Fix those bugs Maisy and Lou!
Despite some of the clunk, it’s such a beautifully and elegantly designed game. I saw a Steam review saying there was a narrative hole about why they were heisting but if you look at the chalkboard in their computer room where they brainstormed company names (‘Impala’), the computer science/engineering qualifications on the wall and the year’s worth of failed client/job applications to big firms pinned next to the sink… you don’t get a more cyberpunk premise. Their career starts in 1979 and in the carriage at the end you find the same failed applications pinned to the wall next to the column of decks.
The way the ending reflects the beginning as you approach the train on your hoverbike, to Clair De Lune again, only this time without Lou and Maisy, is so sad when you realise when you are in the mirror. The drugs on the side, the photos showing them all aging together, the gear covered in cobwebs in the roof space (Nell being the first weever) and you interacting with the pictures straightening them up (how’s that for intimacy?). Clair De Lune is a beautiful piece anyway and makes me well up at the best of times, but the ending here hit me harder than any game I can remember. It’s that Up and The House of Small Cubes thing, y’know? Reflecting on good times – perhaps the best times – always gets me. Few games can stick the landing but Quadrilateral Cowboy’s finale was so good I had no desire to go back to some of the earlier missions to improve my times as I intended. It’s funny because when I was doing the heists I was thoroughly enjoying and totally focused on them but by the end I didn’t want to do more; the ending slammed that deck shut. The story shifts your focus so irrevocably from the job to your life and critically your friends. Wonderful. That carriage sure seemed lonely without them.
I don’t know Tom, that last mission, with the weever magnet and the lasers, was some Impossible Mission shit! It wasn’t dizzying or epic exactly, but the pre-heist planning on the deck of the Farfig and the scale and complexity of the level itself definitely seemed a lot grander than anything that came before it. I thought it was a really great mission to end on and the celebratory clinking of the ramen noodle bowls was lovely. I’ve seen a lot of folk say that Quadrilateral Cowboy isn’t long enough but honestly, I thought it was perfect. It took me about 9-10 hours give or take some AFK pausing and bug replaying.
The gadgets and command-line interfacing with things was just inspired and made me feel more badass than any other espionage game, and the thing is: that feeling is totally earned because you have to work these things out yourself and actually execute them. Using getpos and setpos with a set of blinks to shoot buttons and turn off lasers? Choreographing Maisy and Lou to launch onto a security truck, cut and jellybone into it and nab a safe? Weever magnets and perfectly timed blinking? Downloading brains via 56K modem? So so cool.
Also, badminton is the only sport I play, and this is the first game I’ve ever played to feature it, let alone swing a racket and a hit a shuttlecock. Admittedly, shuttlecocks are super sensitive to moving air so playing on top of a building sounds crazy but… badminton-playing cyberpunks. I’ll take it.
So… yeah, Quadrilateral Cowboy was awesome. Thanks @tomchick for the recommendation (and the stickynote) and thanks again @Left_Empty. One of, if not my favourite, gaming experience of the year.