continue?9876543210 Review
PROS
- Excellent use of lighting effects and sound.
- The hazy narrative and oblique messages leave you constantly asking questions.
CONS
- Controls make movement and combat a headache.
- You spend too much time wandering aimlessly, waiting for something to happen.
VERDICT
If you enjoy good-looking games with arty pretentions and twinkly soundtracks, you might be intigued by Continue?9876543210. However, the restrictive controls and garbled narrative will likely test your patience to breaking point.
- Full Review
- App Store Info
Sometimes we wonder whether some games are named just to make videogame reviewers sound a bit silly.
Continue?9876543210 is an iOS game about a videogame character who is living in digital purgatory, trying to cope the inevitability of his eventual deletion. Remember that cartoon series Reboot where the citizens of the computer town were sucked into videogames? And remember how if anyone was killed in a game, they disappeared to who knows where? Continue? might be the dark answer to that question.
As you work your way through the different worlds of Continue, you spend a lot of time feeling confused. This bewilderment is a running theme throughout the game.
When you talk to the scattered denizens of this world, they answer in curt, often confounding snippets of dialogue. You find yourself in strange battle-zones where you have to defend yourself against constant onslaught from so-called garbage collectors (which look like those wind up teeth you get from joke shops). When this happens, you're forced to decide whether to create shelter and save people from these monstrosities, or to clear the way forward and further your own personal quest.
The thing is, you often find yourself wandering around aimlessly, waiting for a battle event to trigger, or attempting to survive enough encounters to earn food. This food acts as currency, allowing you to pay other characters to open up new areas .
In terms of presentation and tone, Continue? is smart and coherent. The thing is, though, the narrative confusion ends up being more alienating than thematically interesting. Also, the awkward controls render combat a bit of a chore. The virtual d-pad is incredibly limited in range and responsiveness, and it makes the combat sections close to unplayable.
With more refined inputs, this unusual experiment might be easier to recommend. As it is, you'll have to have a great deal of patience to play Continue? without wanting to... well... stop.
Screenshots
$3.99
