12/16/2023 0 Comments Backbone games![]() Naturally, some like the fox journalist Renee are trying to fight back by exposing the stinking sores on the City's seedy underbelly. That the club is also a bunny brothel, drug den, and possibly worse is quietly forgotten by polite society. It's tough for most to scratch out a living, but Clarissa Bloodworth (a bear who recently took control of her family's mob operations under suspicious circumstances) lives a life of luxury, running The Bite nightclub and entertaining her ape overlords at exclusive soirees. Just as in our world, raccoons occupy a position somewhere between the bottom of the totem pole and the gutter, while the City is ruled by the great apes and their lieutenants. The residents may look different, but their problems are painfully recognisable. That stuff's just not for schmucks like Howard, who has a clipping-covered corkboard for a database and has to find a battered payphone every time he needs to make a call. Curiously, too, despite the 1940s vibe, this world has computers and other hi-tech equipment. On the other, that leather-jacketed tough loitering in a doorway is a six-foot-tall rabbit, and the club bouncer is literally a bear. On one hand, this is the world of Marlowe and Spade, all art deco frontages, vintage cars, and slick rain-covered streets. Set in the City, a dystopian metropolis populated by anthropomorphic animals (known as Kinds), it feels at once familiar and alien. The side-scrolling world of Backbone is definitely unique. Oh, and did I mention Howard's a raccoon and his client's an otter? However, though he doesn't realise it yet, today's the day Howard's sad but comfortably predictable world starts to crumble. When Odette Green walks through his door, heavily pregnant and missing a spouse, it looks to be just another day, another dollar (plus expenses). Dreams of creating high photographic art have withered and died, and instead his camera has been relegated to shooting an endless parade of philandering husbands, cheating wives, and deadbeat dads just to keep a roof over his head. The result is likely to be divisive, coming across as a confusing and unsatisfying mess to some, but a memorable, powerful, and thought-provoking experience to others.įor down-at-heel gumshoe Howard Lotor, life isn't exactly working out as planned. Then again, it also juggles more balls than it can handle in its relatively brief runtime, leaving quite a few threads dangling as it races to an abrupt conclusion. The story may be linear and the puzzles close to non-existent, but it has so much to say, and says it with such panache, that this hardly matters. It may start out as a hard-boiled detective story, albeit one with more than the usual quota of talking animals, but before long it has veered into horror, pointed social commentary, and into the realms of dystopian sci-fi, all packaged as a super-slick pixel art movie that drips with atmosphere. Have you ever gotten to the end of a book or film and been left blinking, knowing you just witnessed something great but having no clue what just happened? For me, that covers 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Usual Suspects, pretty much anything by Christopher Nolan, and now EggNut’s Backbone.
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