To Leave Review
by Amr (@siegarettes)
- To Leave
- Developer- Freaky Creations
- Publisher- Freaky Creations
- Steam, PS4
To Leave feels like a game out of 2008. So much of its design philosophy reflects the aesthetics of the Xbox Live Arcade generation, and the indie game trends that rounded out the end of the previous decade. There’s a story that tries to add a sense of importance by tackling subjects like depression and mental health, and the promise that each moment of gameplay, each written word, is a meaningful and intentional delivery device for metaphor. What this means is a game that mixes elements of cinematic platformers, adventure games, and uh, Flappy Bird? It’s an uneven mix, one that’s often beautiful, though just as often archaic in the way it delivers its points.
To Leave begins in the apartment of Harm, a troubled young boy. It’s a cluttered place, left in disarray. The door has been boarded up, objects are strewn all over, and there’s a massive hole in his bathroom wall leading to another strange space. Immediately, Harm begins to ingest a vile green substance, hallucinating and vomiting all our his floor. A door opens up in his room, forming a connection to other areas through the Dark Void. This is where the objective becomes revealed: to travel to a set of temples and completed the platforming challenges there to gain access and offer up your soul. Already you can begin to see the level of metaphor the game is working at.
The temples themselves are a mix of puzzles and platforming. Harm moves the same way the characters of Prince of Persia, or Limbo do, with an emphasis on deliberate movements and smooth animation. Leaps move a set distance without air control, and ledges can be grabbed onto to pull yourself onto the platform above. Mixed in between these are sections where you control Harm’s door, fighting gravity and navigating through narrow passages without running out of Vibrancy, which fuels the door. These become more interesting as new abilities are introduced, but they rarely invoke a specific experience or emotional state through play.
In the interstitial there are pages of Harm’s diary, filled with his ravings, ambitions and plenty of overwritten dialogue and references to spiritual sounding proper nouns. On occasion they’ll provide clues to your objectives and aspects of the game, but they’re often redundant, as you’ll discover those through play regardless. Rarely did they add to the atmosphere or mood, instead coming off as heavy handed ways to deliver narrative where the temples fail to. To Leave relegates the temple sequences to the realm of the abstract, surreal, and metaphorical, which while often beautiful, fail to feel meaningful.
I’m not opposed to heavily metaphorical works, but To Leave doesn’t commit strong enough to any central themes or imagery to deliver on that front. It’s content to leave you with strange imagery and situations and the promise that all of it is meaningful and symbolic. It operates with the same philosophy of games like Braid and other artgames of that generation: by taking a relatively conventional set of mechanics and structures, and applying meaning on top of them, rather than use them to deliver the metaphor itself.
To Leave’s blunt approach feels even more dated given that this year alone we’ve seen games with more interesting takes on similar subjects. Little Nightmares, Inside, and even Yume Nikki have all brought more interesting ideas to the cinematic platformer, Cultist Simulator managed to deliver obfuscated stories in a more interesting format, and Anamorphine, for all its faults, made its depictions of mental illness feel more concrete and relatable through its repeated use of surrealist symbols and spaces.
By comparison, To Leave feels as if it isn’t cognizant of the way games have changed in the last decade. It isn’t without its charms–there’s imagery here that’s worthwhile on its own–but it’s difficult to look at without seeing ten years of cliches I thought had been left behind.