Framed by Loveshack is a slick
film noir-style story of an epic foot chase told in a graphic novel format. The only problem is that every page results in cops nabbing the person with an all-important briefcase, or that person falling to their death. The user's job is to move the frames on each page around so the chase can continue, this includes occasionally helping out what is arguably the story's bad guy, or as we like to call him "Mustachio McSneaky."
The story is fairly standard noir fare. A dame gives a briefcase to a dude in a fedora and a swishy trench coat (seriously, that coat is so swishy. Well done, animators!). Not far behind is Mustachio McSneaky, who wants the briefcase for himself, and he's willing to kill to get it. The cops are on the lookout for all three of them, and must be avoided at all costs. The visuals in the game are great, it strikes a nice balance between the moodiness of the noir genre with the colorful palate of a comic book -- the art style is different, but the colors put us in mind of something like
Watchmen. The music is a soft jazzy affair, which repeats without being annoyingly repetitive.
Some of the pages are dead easy to see what needs to be done in order to help the character make it through the frames alive and undetected. In the more complex sequences, it's important to remember that the character might be able to make it through a frame in one spot, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need to be elsewhere on the page for the whole sequence to work. One particularly amusing example is the page where the Dame is trying to escape Mustachio and some cops on a train.
At first, all the user can do is move frames around, with one or two at the beginning or end frozen in place so they can't be moved. As time goes on, things become more complex. Some frames can't be moved around on the page, but can be turned to the side or upside down; this is particularly problematic with rectangular-shaped frames that will change the order in which frames are played in the sequence. We found the levels where frames had to be moved as the sequence was playing to be our favorites (see our earlier comment about the one where the Dame is on the train).
As one might expect from a game based on graphic novel frames,
Framed is quite linear, and not very long unfortunately. However, the game is
available on iTunes and is $5, that breaks down to about $1 per hour of entertainment we received from it, which we feel is pretty good. Even if it the user is a visual genius and takes less than one hour to finish it though, it's a fantastic work of art, and is worth playing.
Who Framed is for:
Anyone who enjoys clever gameplay mechanics, the noir genre, and/or comic books.
Who Framed might not be for:
People who don't enjoy a linear gameplay experience.
-- Michelle Elbert (
@mcelbert)
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