"Sandbox"

I'm glad I don't stream new games I play.

Had I put my opening minutes with DONTNOD's Jusant live on air for the world to see, they would've potentially had the latest "Games Journalist Can't Play Games Clip" as I spent minutes trying to long jump a vast distance rather than just grabbing onto the nearby rocks on a wall.

This was entirely my fault, not playing with glasses, skipping past tutorial prompts, and just being daft, but my stupidity also exposed the game's mechanics in a way that impacted the rest of my experience. Despite my idiocy…

I never died.

When attempting to swing a big distance a jump, the game didn't let me leap off to my death. When spotting a gap my character should've been able to fit through, the game's soft invisible ways prevented me. When reaching out to grab the edges of a metal wall or rock-face that didn't relate to the game's current objective, my character would never touch it.

I realized quickly this game was only going to let me climb on its terms.

The term Sandbox has become very loose over the decades. I think the easiest way to summarize is with Rockstar. Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 are called Sandbox games, yet they also give you mission fail descriptions like this…

Sandbox to me isn't really a genre, it's more a design.

Rockstar's games have several aspects that are absolutely a Sandbox. Wanted Levels, Pedestrians, and Vehicle Physics… though only relatively recently for that last one. Vehicles were quite simplistic in Grand Theft Auto all the way up until 2008, the driving was meant to fascinate the rest of GTA's gameplay rather than be an in-depth Sandbox itself.

The vehicles followed a very strict set of rules permitted by the developer, many of which were technical constraints. You were always going to hit a low top-speed very quickly regardless of vehicle in-order to allow the open world to load in, or turn at a certain radius regardless of angle.

That's what (despite the comparisons) made Driver so different.

Its vehicle physics were far more in-depth to the point where no jump you took or handbrake 180 in the alleyway felt exactly the same. The game wasn't a simulator, it still had limitations, they were just much more subtle, and far exceeded the limit of most player's skill levels. It's far more likely that any mistake made in a game like Driver's 1-3 or its Sister game Stuntman, was going to brush against the player's ego rather than the game's code.

You don't feel Reflection's hand on the controller.

I felt DONTNOD's hand all the time while playing Jusant.

It has a stamina meter, multiple gameplay twists that add variety and depth, and several breathtaking environments that I wanted to progress through to the end, but in a game that's so intentionally minimal in its plot, character, pacing, and rewards, I just couldn't muscle through the moments where such a simple action on my end, led to such an overt limitation of the gameplay.

I noticed all the times when my character reached out for a wall they shouldn't have been able to reach, when pressing jump led to a different character behavior when I wasn't going to make the game's calculated that I won't make the gap, or the complete inability to take damage when smacking into a wall.

There's a thought that kept running through my head while playing Jusant however, and that was how much the Cairn Demo that I recommended on here, effected my perceptions of this game.

That going from a game which has the Sandbox design in its climbing to one that doesn't, is why I was frustrated…

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I doubt it because the reason I played this DONTNOD game, was because I recently finished their catalogue of Narrative Driven Games.

I finished Life is Strange 2, dropped Tell Me Why, dropped Twin Mirror, yet finished Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. Over the years I've finished bad games, great games, and dropped both as well for a variety of reasons.

I don't think I dropped Jusant because it wasn't appealing to me. The atmosphere in the game is absolutely fantastic, the game's companion is one of the most adorable in gaming history, the pacing is spot on, maximizing its assets and gameplay to drip feed just enough new things to keep the player going…

But then I'd hit that Top Speed Limit, and unlike GTA, when that part of Jusant's gameplay hits a wall, there's nothing else to fall back on.

It's a like a Driver game with GTA III's physics.

Still probably going to use the Soundtrack for something though…