Tardy Review (Sirozha)
Introduction
Tardy is a short point and click adventure game with unique puzzles.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
+ Unique puzzle style
+ Beautiful pixel-art
+ Interesting story
Cons:
- Too much useless text
- Lack of quality of life features
- Very short (2-3 hours)
Story
While running away from the police, you sneak onto a spaceship and fall right into a cryochamber. Waking up after a long sleep, you find yourself stranded on an empty and apparently broken spaceship. Lucky for you, this is no ordinary spaceship. First of all, you don’t need any special skills to repair it, instead you will solve puzzles! Secondly, it has a mysterious history that you will uncover in due time. It’s an engaging story with a pretty good plot twist at the end. However, there is one problem with it, there’s just too much useless text that adds no value to the story. So, the game can feel tiring despite its short play time.
Gameplay
From the store page screenshots, it may look like any other point and click adventure, but it’s not. There’s no inventory, and each screen is a self-contained puzzle. Although there’s no inventory, you will still have to interact with various items by dragging them around on screen. For example, when you find a book with instructions for some puzzles, you will be able to move it to any place on the screen. Naturally, most of the game’s puzzles are based on this mechanic. So, it feels a bit predictable, because when you find a flashlight, you’ll instantly know that, you have to move it around the screen to see a hidden code. However, it doesn’t feel boring, because there are other types of puzzles and mini-games mixed in. There’s one weird thing about game’s controls, during mini-games you can use a keyboard to play. But when you interact with in-game computers, you have to input commands by pressing keys on a virtual keyboard, which is a pain. The save system is also a bit flawed, each screen can have multiple puzzles that are solved consequtively, but reloading a save will bring you back to the beginning of the screen. It’s not a big problem though, because it doesn’t take long to solve each puzzle.
Graphics & Audio
The game’s pixel art doesn’t hurt your eyes and gives it a nostalgic look. There isn’t much action on screen, but there’re a lot of interactions with computers. The way they are animated gives the game an immersive tactile feeling. The audio on the other hand is pretty standard, what’d you expect from the game taking place in space. There’s no voice acting either.
Performance
Specs: AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU 8GB, 32GB RAM.
At 1080p resolution, the game runs at steady 165 FPS without any issues.
Conclusion
Tardy is a fun short adventure that might get tiring at times, but makes up for it with unique puzzles and interesting story. It’s not a great game, but it’s good enough to spend one evening on.