Quick Thoughts On: Imagine Me
Imagine Me is agitated by its own existence. It can’t decide where to commit, patching on modes of play like a bad worker trying to explain their way out of a botched job by showing you all the little, trivial tasks they’ve completed instead. Right out of the gate Imagine Me tries its hand at procedurally generated level designs (it can’t be that hard, right? Everyone’s doing it). But once the algorithms start rolling and the levels actually come into existence, it’s immediately clear Imagine Me hasn’t the slightest clue what it’s doing. Chunks of familiar levels become hastily adjoined to one another into an unplayable mess of broken hitboxes and impenetrable block mazes. It’s chaos of the highest degree, silent caverns filled only with the cries of my broken soul as I beat myself against a metaphorical wall trying to beat a game which is quite literally impossible to complete. Somewhere along the development pipeline it must have been clear that something had gone horrible wrong, but rather than rework the disastrous level generator into something functional, Imagine Me instead decides to abandon it altogether and starts building levels by hand (it worked for Mario, didn’t it?).
But much to my dismay Imagine Me hasn’t much of a knack for level designs, random or otherwise. At numerous points it almost appears as if whoever actually designed these levels fell asleep and never completed them, or otherwise became so bored with their own creation that they decided enough was enough and shipped whatever they had in front of them at the time. And thus we are left with 30 or so astoundingly dull and simplistic levels which play very much like the afterthought they were.
I might feel worse about the depths of Imagine Me’s failure if it didn’t seem so apathetic toward aspiring to even moderate quality (or functionality). Everything feels empty and tedious, leading you in circles until either the game breaks or you stop playing. Imagine Me is sloppy and dysfunctional, but I couldn’t say it seems to actually care.
"Quick Thoughts" is a subset of my normal reviews for smaller games which might not fit into a full review but I still have something to say about.