Escape rooms are a fun – albeit expensive – pastime. There’s something thrilling about being locked in a room with nothing but your wits and the clues in front of you, and being asked to find your own way out. Plenty of games have capitalised on this concept over the years, from simpler titles like The Room series, all the way to cult classic franchises such as 999 and its Nonary Games successors.
N.E.R.D tries its level best to capture the same feeling elicited by a real-world escape room by blending in-case puzzle mechanic with recorded FMV content, a trend which has been coming back into style for indie games over the past decade or so. When executed well, this kind of presentation can lend a game’s story a bit more gravitas. If you as the player feel like you’re part of a grand movie plot, your drive to find out what happens to the character stuck in their room of tricks and traps will be all the stronger. Unfortunately, N.E.R.D‘s problems begin to reveal themselves from the first cutscene, and they boil down to this: the story isn’t very well written.
Indie games are, by their very nature, working to tell a compelling narrative or, alternatively, provide a player with riveting gameplay, on a smaller budget, usually with a similarly downsized team compared to AAA alternatives. This can lead to some amazing experiences when the developers acknowledge what they do and don’t have to finalise a project, and work from there to create something special. I say this to establish that an indie game does not need to have jaw-dropping visual fidelity or a budget nearing seven figures (or even six) to result in a compelling title. It does, however, need to have well though-through gameplay and a serviceable plot. I regret to say that N.E.R.D has neither.
The first series of cutscenes are the ones I’m going to focus on most due to how baffling they are as an introduction to this story’s characters. The protagonist is, to put it bluntly, a horrible person. Despite having been with his partner for ten years, he knows next to nothing about her. Couple this with the rigid acting from the actors involved, and I’m stuck wondering why I should care when she appears to be kidnapped by the game’s antagonists – and frankly, why the protagonist would care either. The plot is shaky at best (in the game’s first chapter, the player is able to make a phone call despite his mobile not having an active SIM card), and the FMV scenes are poorly shot. The camera loses focus during simple scenes which could easily have been re-filmed, and props (including, at one point, a severed finger) look so fake that they draw you out of the concept entirely.
I can’t help but wonder if N.E.R.D‘s developers would have been better served allocating their budget to tell this story in a different way. You can tell they went all-in on the FMV idea. Scene transitions are also played back as video, and little portraits of the characters’ actors will appear next to dialogue to remind you that, yes, you are playing as a real person. This additions only slow down the gameplay and, unfortunately, remind you that the next time you do see a full cutscene, you’ll likely be left scratching your head rather than excited to uncover answers and progress the narrative.
What about the puzzles, then? This is where N.E.R.D managed to redeem itself somewhat, offering challenges that genuinely feel like they’ve been ripped straight out of a real-world escape room. This is great, until you complete a few of them and realise they all fit one of two archetypes. Half of the puzzles in N.E.R.D are extremely linear; their solutions flow into the following puzzle, offering a keyword or a number combination or a key you can use to progress. The rest are somewhat battling, trial-and-error based experiences which can leave you completely stumped – and not in a good way.
Those readers who have been to an escape room before will know that if they get stuck, or the puzzle’s entry point is not clear enough, a game master will often call out over the radio to offer a hint or a prompt to get you started. N.E.R.D has no such system, and you’re often left wishing there were… or more simply, that the puzzles simply all made sense from the outset.
If you’re a hardcore escape room fan or just like a good puzzle, you’ll probably find something to enjoy with N.E.R.D – it’s far from terrible, and there are glimmers of what could have been a really good game here. Unfortunately, it’s dragged down by comical narrative choices and puzzles that work until you realise you’re either completing chores or banging your head against a wall hoping the next key you need will fall out as a reward.
