Backbone – Review (PC)

By Dave Lambden Last updated Jun 7, 2021

Backbone is a detective noir story driven adventure game and the first title developed by Canadian indie developer EggNut. Set in a dystopian Vancouver and populated entirely by animals, the game takes a dark and dingy mystery game and colors it with some playful intrigue. Playing as a raccoon detective was more than enough to draw us in and see if Backbone can leverage its creative setting to deliver a memorable story.

Being a point and click adventure, Backbone lives and dies with its story, setting and characters. The game is set in Vancouver which is intriguing as this world class city at the base of the North Shore mountains has seldom been used in video games. While the boroughs of Gastown, Granville, and West End will be familiar to anyone who’s visited the city, the walls protecting this dystopian version of Vancouver will not be. A mysterious wasteland envelops the outskirts of the city and inhabitants are coaxed by The Wall to never imagine venturing beyond its boundaries.

The characters of Backbone immediately act as a defining factor of the game. You play as Howard Lotor, a run down private investigator who’s at wits end running the same old cheating husband stake out cases night after night. Also Howard is a raccoon in a trench coat. In fact, all of Backbone‘s characters are animals. Howard’s best friend is a taxi driving beaver, his mysterious partner an investigative journalist fox, and the game’s protagonist is a crime family leading albino bear. Furthermore, the game clearly wears it’s societal strata on it’s sleeve. Just like in nature, not all species are equal. But, rather than a food chain, Backbone puts predator and prey into a class system. Carnivores like wolves and bears occupy the highest levels of society while raccoons, otters, and rodents make up the lowest. Apes are almost mystical figures of society, rarely being seen and almost regarded as deities. This class system is expertly woven into the game’s setting and narrative. Cats and dogs in wealthier boroughs sneer at Howard as if he’s in the wrong neighborhood. In the poorer West End, Howard will encounter the ‘Deadmice Collective’ – a rat-led anti mice movement that sees the poorest of the city literally killing each other for scraps.

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The story however is where Backbone falls short. It all starts out very promising as Howard is offered a case from a troubled otter to follow her husband and find proof of his adultery. This quickly leads to something much more than Howard’s usual gig of following a cheating husband. Howard is led into the darkest underbelly of the city and quickly gets tangled up in a mysterious conspiracy involving the city’s elite. Through Act 1 and most of Act 2 the player is drip-fed morsels of clues, introducing more characters and further developing the possible antagonists and revealing new ones. The mysteries slowly unravel and there are genuine questions surrounding key players’ motivations and who is really friend and foe. Suddenly, however, things get weird. And then the game ends.

There are so many loose ends and questions left unanswered. Key motivations are left muddled and even mysterious characters left unrevealed. Parts of the story are left so ambiguous and perhaps up for interpretation. It was, however, incredibly unsatisfying how things end up. It was a bit like a night of heavy drinking. Things start out well, get really fun early on, then get really fuzzy and suddenly black out. It’s equally frustrating how the pacing of the game is so meaty near the beginning and suddenly so expeditiously near the end. Act 1 serves as a great introduction and expertly whets the players appetite. Act 2 is oddly lengthy but does a great job at bringing new characters into the fold, fleshing out the world, and adding further complexity to the mystery. Then suddenly the game speeds through Acts 3, 4, and 5 with such ferocity that the player barely has time to piece things together. Adding to the confusion are the game’s puzzles, or puzzle I should say. As far as we can tell, there was only one. It was very good and required manipulating pieces of paper to reveal a hidden code of numbers and using a cryptic sequence of shapes to figure out the order of the numbers. It was so cool, in fact, I was looking forward to what other puzzles would stand in Howard’s way. But then there weren’t any. And yes, Backbone touts itself as a game having puzzles. Not just one.

Luckily Backbone is a very pretty game to look at. And this is particularly impressive to say of an indie pixel art game. The artists have done a fantastic job of breathing life into the world of Backbone one pixel at a time. The beauty of Vancouver’s evergreen and mountainous vistas are somehow captured in the backdrops of bustling city streets and gloomy slums. Little details in both lighting and set dressings make the world feel intricate and alive. There are moments where you can trigger a cutscene that serves primarily to let you soak it all in as Howard. One example early on takes place inside a high end club. The camera pans as a jazz singer performs on stage while dogs and cats sip expensive drinks and the dimly lit room is sparsely lit by small table top candles. It’s a little moment that’s meant for the player to soak in the personality and feel of the environment.

There are several areas of Backbone that are executed in expert fashion. The beautiful pixel art, the engrossing use of an interesting dystopian noir setting, and a deep set of engaging characters are some of these. Although the story, arguably the most important aspect of any point-and-click adventure, falls well short of making the game memorable or even sensical. Perhaps Backbone was meant to take an art-house approach to story telling where answers aren’t deliberately given and more based on cryptic meaning and interpretation. That may be appealing for some, but really doesn’t make for telling a rounded out and satisfying tale. The game feels provocative in its first few hours, but this isn’t enough for a solid recommendation outside of die-hard fans of the point-and-click genre.

Backbone launches on PC on Tuesday June 8, 2021.