Traverser’s most arresting feature the downtrodden ambiance of its environments. The sun that engendered the planet’s life has died, and the only workable solution was to build a city deep underground. Brimstone, the subterranean refuge of humanity, comes equipped with a litany of stylized and vaguely unkempt British architecture, but more interesting is the dichotomy between its citizens. The Upper City is home to the more well-to-do members of society while the Lower City houses the homeless and, for lack of a better word, filthy denizens that remain. There’s a bit of gravity manipulation physically holding everything together, as a minor facet of Brimstone is that it’s literally two cities on top of each other.
It was a smart move by the folks at Gatling Goat not to go too deep down the rabbit hole of Traverser’s implicit fiction. It tells you what you need to know; oxygen is a valuable—practically the only—resource, The Raven Corporation facilitates its distribution, and the city of Brimstone is ripe for some sort of civil unrest. Audio-logs in the form of mechanical birds flesh out minor details, but generally questions like why does the gravity work like this, what the hell happened to the sun, and where’s all this sewage leaking are kept out of the foreground. A mind can wander away with these questions without Traverser overindulging in tiring exposition.
It also helps that Traverser, truly, aches to tell more of a personal story. Valerie Bennet quickly passes her test and earns the title of; you guessed it, traverser, enabling her to freely move between the Upper and Lower City at specific points. From there the narrative picks up speed and moves over the course of its four or so hours, but it’s safe to say that Valerie’s notion of the Raven Corporation and the glue that’s holding the two cities together quickly becomes open to a different interpretation.
What Valerie actually does usually comes back to a traverser’s handy tool; a Gravity Glove. As a player, the Gravity Glove enables you to click on and drag specially marked and typically small objects around the environment. During the tutorial for this mechanic I quickly feared it may devolve Traverser into an escalating series of box puzzles (put a box in front of the lasers! wear a barrel to avoid lasers!), but, thankfully, it’s more than a series of aimless tasks.
Instead, Traverser splits its time between navigating the upper and lower cities and an assorted collection of puzzles and challenges. All of the usual hallmarks are here. Twist and turn lasers into mirrors for some specific purpose, tip-toe behind and around lackadaisical guards, figure out how to blow up walls with nearby explosives, and even managing navigation through a grid carefully arranged occasionally explosive tiles. Light platforming sequences are also in order and, while it could have been my relative unfamiliarity with WASD-based jumping and moving, they seemed a little suspect with Traverser’s floaty jump mechanics. This only lead to a handful of unfortunate fall deaths, but it’s a foul mark all the same.
What’s important is, platforming aside, all of Traverser’s objectives are mechanically sound. It’s fun to use the Gravity Glove at a base level, whether it’s aimlessly bopping a citizen in the head or trying to stack boxes and conquer an objective. Outside of a late-game stealth sequence I had to repeat several times, the game really isn’t even particularly hard. Figuring out what to do, especially during the trio of boss fights, can be challenging, but the ease of execution makes the remainder of Traverser a breeze to player through.
I’d have to assume that’s exactly what Traverser’s prospective audience is out there looking for. It’s nicely put together, features an unusually gifted heroine, assembles a stable of reliable mechanics and levels to test those mechanics, and wraps it all under fairly engaging blanket of weird fiction. Traverser feels like a game built for a Saturday afternoon, and while there are a handful of collectables and alternate paths tempting successive runs, it’s nicely suited for a single engagement. Transience, while traditionally thought of as corrosive and incompatible, works in the favor of Traverser.
