P0: Byte-Sized Brilliance is a new oddly-named anomaly hunt game by the folks at Deadbolt Interactive. They also made the anomaly hunt game, P1: Anchor Light, where you traipse through a lighthouse looking for anomalies while also playing a big game of musical statues. I played that one late last year and, while it had promise, I thought the central game mechanic drained all the life from the rest of the game. The lighthouse theme is perhaps apropos, because that thought shone once again when playing P0: Byte-Sized Brilliance.
Anomaly hunting is a genre that’s quite close to my heart. On the surface, it’s a nice and simple loop. It’s spot the difference. As soon as something changes, mash your keyboard until it goes away. But below that is the perfect formula for some clever horror. It naturally builds suspense, and the soft, easy anomalies butter you up, freeing the game to ram something scary down your throat. P0: Byte-Sized Brilliance chucks that suspense in the bin in the pursuit of ‘Speedrunning’, and tries to fill the gaps with some barrel-scraping humour.
Send In The Clowns
The basic premise of P0: Byte-Sized Brilliance is nice and simple. You’re applying for a job at Paradise Corp., which does… something or other. After a somewhat excruciating Powerpoint presentation, we’re set a test: go through thirty floors and report any anomalies. We’re essentially in a wheely office chair, able to spin round 360 degrees, and we have two buttons. Press the red one if you see something change, press the green one if you don’t. The twist being that you have ten seconds to decide. It’s a mechanic that sounds good on paper. Can’t beat a bit of panic.
In reality, it quickly reduced everything down to mindless frustration. Ten seconds is not a long time to scan four screens. Especially when you’re a thirty-something man who functions solely on coffee. By the time I get to the final screen, I usually only have a second to decide. It wipes out all other feelings. P0: Byte-Sized Brilliance keeps throwing bloodied clowns at me, or trying to make me laugh with ducks, but it’s all for nought. I’ve no time to do anything but slam the button and reset my brain. Every failure was an immediate restart. Run flowing into run. There was nothing but constant stress and frustration.
Lame Duck
A slightly longer timer might have helped. Now it’s easy to dismiss these complaints as me being a bit rubbish, but there are fundamental issues too. On harder difficulties, the anomalies get more subtle, but there’s no indication of what we’ve missed when we fail. We just have to restart the entire run. If I struggle to see something in the first ten seconds, there’s no guarantee I’ll see it in the next, so my runs kept grinding to a halt. In the end, it was P0: Byte-Sized Brilliance‘s peculiar habit of repeating the same anomalies within a run that got me through the second difficulty setting.
This frustration might have been eased if the game didn’t keep throwing annoying things at me. I know humour is subjective, but some of the things in this game make me very grumpy. Half the jokes are just outdated pop culture references. All your base are belong to us? Anyone who gets that reference is probably happier playing bingo instead. The rest are usually just mocking us in silly voices, which turns burgeoning frustration into straight up anger. Again, it’s subjective, but I just don’t enjoy being in this world.
P0: Byte-Sized Brilliance – A Failed Experiment
Not to say P0: Byte-Sized Brilliance doesn’t have any other bells and whistles. Runs earn you a bit of cash, which you can either spend on vague hints or on little snippets of worldbuilding. I did appreciate the latter. It also gives you a ‘Buddy’, a little clay-like fella, which you can dress up in various hats and accessories. Not sure why you’d want to do that, especially as fails cut your winnings in half, but it’s there. My little guy wore his traffic cone and banana throughout all my victories. So that’s nice.
To end on some credit, I did find it difficult to stop playing P0: Byte-Sized Brilliance. Its subtitle is accurate. Runs are small, five minute jobs. But the main reason it hooked me was my refusal to let it beat me, rather than me having lots of fun. In fact, I wrote up this review right after beating the second difficulty setting. My final thoughts are that P0 feels like an experiment to mash together two very different things: anomaly hunts and speedrunning. I just don’t think it’s worked. For one I don’t understand speedrunning something that you have little to no control over. What if all the anomalies keep showing up on the last screen you look at?
A lot of games in the genre just have a clock counting up to six AM. A ten second timer could arguably be a way of cutting out all the faff. Unfortunately, in doing so, they’ve cut out all the reasons I like the genre. Those who like a bit of panic may enjoy it in five minute doses, but it’s just not for me.
