Backing Backbone

Earlier this year I bought several games on Steam. It was winter. It was cold. It was wet. I was inside a lot. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Three of those games had very similar settings and themes. They were all variants of the anthropomorphic noir detective subgenre, in which animals talk and act like humans as they go around behaving as if they were starring in a 1940s B-movie alongside Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre. 

There are a lot of games like this. Why, I have no idea. I find it difficult to imagine how the subgenre even came to exist, let alone why it's become so enduringly popular. I mean, I'm a year or so off retirement and the movies that inspired these games had already fallen out of fashion before I was born. And yet here they are, all those cynical PIs with their irony and anomie, trudging through neon-lit streets in the rain, swapping gruff one-liners with hoodlums in leather jackets and swearing never to get involved with another dame, just as they get involved with another dame.

Except now they're all cats and dogs and raccoons and even goddam chickens. Explain it to me. Go on, I dare you.

So far this year I've played four of these games, three on Steam, one on Prime Gaming, and finished three. I guess I must like them. 

Not that they're all the same. Or even all that much alike. They vary from lighthearted spoofs to existential essays but they all have two things in common - talking animals and mystery. 

The game I just finished, Backbone, started out as a Kickstarter. Having played it, I was curious to see what the pitch had been. It was clear a lot of people weren't happy with some of the turns the game had taken in development and I wondered whether they'd been misled by the campaign or by their own expectations.

Having read the details, I do think the complainers might have a point. I should caveat that by saying I loved the game, finding many of the aspects others label as problematic to be among its many strengths. I wouldn't, however, disagree that it doesn't seem to be exactly the game the Kickstarter was selling.

Back in 2018, the campaign funded at $95k over a $63k ask. Canadian dollars. It hit 50%  of its stretch goals. The game was scheduled to release a year later. It actually arrived on Steam three years after the close of the campaign, in June 2021. By Kickstarter standards and given everything that was going on in the world at that time, it seems like a reasonable outcome. 

The question comes not so much with the timeframe as with what was eventually delivered. The pitch promised "a pixel art cinematic adventure with stealth and action elements" in which players would be able to "solve detective cases, interrogate witnesses, explore the intriguing and dangerous world... and sneak your way to safety using smell-based stealth mechanics". 

Further gameplay detail included "No hand-holding - move forward through the game by your own rules. Every case has numerous trails, and it’s up to you to decide which one to follow." There would be "Stealth & Action. In the animal world, smell is the most powerful sense. Hide in multi-level environments, mask your scent in garbage bins, follow suspects and escape the chase. "

Unsurprisingly, given all of that, some people thought they were getting a detective game. That's not really what happened.

Backbone currently has a "Mixed" rating from nearly 1600 reviews. It's Recent Review status is better at "Mostly Positive." I imagine the improvement comes from newer purchasers having already heard the complaints and factored them in before committing. Almost all those complaints revolve around two things: lack of agency and the ending.

Of the former, there can be no doubt. There may be "numerous trails" as promised but all of them lead to the same destination. Different choices result in varying conversations but no matter what you choose, the plot moves inexorably forwards to its one and only conlcusion. There's no option to save. The game does that for you as it sees fit, keeping just one updated copy. You have but one choice at all times: continue from where the game last saved or start over from the beginning.

As for "Stealth & Action", it wouldn't be fair to say they don't feature in gameplay at all but they do seem at best tacked on and even that limited degree of interaction dwindles away as the game progresses. The vaunted "smell-based stealth mechanics", if they even exist, passed me by completely. I don't remember a single instance when smell came into play.

I did read a complaint or two about a lack of puzzles, which seems less fair. There are a couple, near the start, but the Kickstarter pitch never claimed there would be any. Backbone is very much not a Point & Click adventure game. It's much more a visual novel.  

A more reasonable complaint involves the absence of the promised "detective work". While it may be nominally correct to say there's some investigating involved, every clue and every discovery is pre-ordained. Every interactable object is highlighted, mostly only as and when required. "Detection" largely consists of walking through the scrolling landscape, clicking on each prompt as it appears.

Complaints about the ending and particularly the major change of direction taken by the plot in the latter part of the game seem to me to be far less justifiable. The Kickstarter page clearly describes a world that "combines the visual and social contrasts of film noir with anthropomorphic animals, retrofuturistic technologies, and dystopian fiction". No-one should really be surprised by the strong science fiction elements when they appear.

The storyline lives up to its billing as "challenging" and "thought-provoking". Unsettling and disturbing would be two other adjectives I might use. It's easy to see why backers, already irritated by the absence of the kind of gameplay they expected, might bridle at the discomfitting nature of the narrative as it reveals itself.

And so to that ending. Without spoiling anything more than the illusion that this might be a cosy, comfortable game full of cuddly animals who talk, I'll say it's bleak, uncompromising and depressing. I loved it.

It's also - and I think this might be the real reason it's proved so unpopular - wholly incomplete. It leaves the player with that unpleasantly familiar sensation of coming to the end of the final season of a series that's failed to renew. There are more plot threads left dangling than were there when it began.

Unlike a cancelled TV show, however, I have the strong impression this is entirely intentional. It's certainly consistent with the stated desire to tell "a tale about how our environment shapes us, and how we influence it in return." Given that Eggnut, the developer, went on to release not a sequel but a prequel, "Tails: The Backbone Preludes", it seems the original game ends in just the way they intended. 

Within those constraints, the game they made is excellent. It is, indeed, as they also said it would be, "a pixel art cinematic adventure". The art lives up its billing as "a modern take on the classical retro adventure look", filled with "contrasting silhouettes against the setting sun, dust particles, neon signs and steaming sewer hatches". It's one of the most visually appealing games I've played for a good while, with enormous depth of detail that richly repays long moments spent studying the background of every scene.

The writing, which gets plenty of praise even from some of those who dislike the game as a whole, is, for once, almost as good as people say. True, noir tropes do provide a safe scaffold, but here language expresses itself with an unconstrained fluency, not limited by the expectations of the form. As the visuals are cinematic, so the writing feels novelistic.

While the plot maintains a steady throughline, numerous diversions add considerable tonal variety. As anticipated, world-building is to the fore, matching the claim that there's "A rich, living and breathing world waiting to be explored". It's a world whose depth and detail we'll most probably never get to see but isn't that always the way of these things?

As for the music, described as "combining jazz and electronic music to create a viscous soundtrack that feels like a dark, enveloping veil of bebop and cinematic soundscapes"... well, judge for yourself. Suffice it to say, every time a song started up in game I stopped whatever I was doing and listened to the end and I'm writing this post to a backdrop of the soundtrack right now.

All in all I can heartily recommend Backbone to anyone who doesn't develop a twitch when they aren't in control. It may not be that much of a game but its a hell of an experience. In tone and range it reminds me most of Disco Elysium, a comparison Steam itself seems keen to promote, although it's flatter and less nuanced. Still, it would be a high bar to reach. Even to challenge it is praiseworthy.

I've wishlisted "Tails" to pick up when it goes on sale. It's currently rated "Very Positive", strongly suggesting the original game found its audience. I would be among them.