4/5 ★ – hunkypet's review of Rime.

Rime is a beautifully visualised 3D puzzle platformer that wears its inspirations proud and thankfully manages to achieve its on sense of individuality. The most striking thing with Rime is it’s visuals, it’s easily one of the most stunning games I have ever played. Time after time I had to stop what I was doing just so I could soak in the incredible cel shaded vistas. The audio side of things is no slouch either, the game has an absolutely wonderful score that blew me away as many times as the visuals. Gameplay wise it’s pretty simple, you can grab things and you can jump.. that’s it. The best way to describe Rime is like constantly being stuck in different Legend of Zelda like dungeons. The game is relatively easy, the puzzles are never to challenging but still fun enough to keep the player engaged and this is where most of the games complaints are held to. It’s boring or it’s to easy are commonly thrown at Rime and yes it is an easy game but I disagree it’s never boring, the sense of wonder, achievement and serenity pushed me on continually. Easily my favourite thing with Rime is how it manages to navigate you and keep you focused in these seemingly daunting open worlds. The landscapes and architure scale around you vertically, with great detail and it’s almost overwhelming,however the game has a phenomenal ability through clever design and expert visual cues at keeping you on the straight and narrow. Yes, admittedly the GPS tracker that is our friend the fox is abit on the nose and in all honestly I wished he wasn’t always there but he did always keep me moving in the right direction. I have very few complaints with Rime though they are the reason that I would not class it a masterpiece. The story is one of loss, acceptance and moving on. It’s by no means told poorly, it’s just not up to the incredibly high standards of the rest of the game. I was emotionally invested in what smidgen of story was here but not emotionally moved. The game did drag just over the halfway mark in one particular chapter, I thought it was about 15/20 mins to long and really took the wind out of its sails. However these minor complaints pale in comparison to the technical problems this game has. It’s puzzling why the developers decided to ship the game as is... I thought I was going mad or my PlayStation was causing the issues. The game has a pretty inconsistent frame rate which allows for a pretty frustrating experience however it’s the uneven frame pacing that allows for constant slow down and judder on camera movement that really pushes it over the edge. It’s playable don’t get me wrong but it’s made me so angry, as it if was sorted it would be a near perfect experience. For anyone thinking of playing this game I’ll run down what each version does as it’s a little confusing. Base PS4 and XONE and play at a frame rate of 20-35 at 1080P and are not optimal at all. Pro and One X play at a frame rate of 40-55 at 1080P and while a smoother experience it’s far from perfect. Pro also has a graphics enhancement patch that bizarrely One X doesn’t, better texture filtering and shadow resolution. It’s utterly frustrating why the developer didn’t either drop the resolution down so on enhanced consoles it could lock to 60FPS or up the resolution to maybe 1440P and put a 30FPS cap. The best way to play the game today is backwards compatible on PS5 or XSX to achieve a locked 60FPS. PS5 will achieve this and carry PS4 Pro’s patch. For me it was so nearly a masterpiece, what I’m left with is a great game and an experience I will cherish. Played on PS4 Pro