Full Bore
Released off the back of a Kickstarter initiative that raised $16,383, Full Bore is an open-world indie puzzle game rendered in pixel art that evokes the spirit of everything from Super Metroid to Terraria and Boulder Dash. The three-person team at Whole Hog Games completed the first part of the game, The First Dig, in late 2013 and have now followed up with Part 2 – Into Hard Earth which adds an additional swathe of content and goes back and tweaks the existing game, which accompanies its release on Steam.
Full Bore has the player take on the role of Frederick the boar (or Hildi, if you prefer a female protagonist), who is essentially indentured to mining tycoon Gullinbursti after inadvertently destroying the contents of his bank vault. In order to repay Gullinbursti, our porcine hero must negotiate an extensive mining complex to locate and dig up gems to replace the lost valuables. The progression of game and story is non-linear, with new areas opening up depending on where the player explores and fragments of the narrative revealed through conversation with the other boars that inhabit the mine as well as interacting with mysterious computer terminals scattered throughout the complex.
Full Bore’s puzzles are based around tile manipulation, accomplished by moving or destroying blocks in the game’s environment to clear a pathway to a gem. The removal of a tile will cause blocks above it to shift downwards, opening new pathways and closing others. It’s this mechanic that underpins most of the game’s basic puzzles but other gameplay elements are soon introduced to add to the challenge. Mining lasers remove entire rows of material at a time while layers of loose sand and gravel and explosive blocks introduce a degree of unpredictability into Frederick’s burrowing. Finding a route to each gem becomes an exercise in trial and error and forward-planning, aided by the handy rewind feature, a new addition for Into Hard Earth, which allows players to undo events with unintended consequences and try again.
Unfortunately, the trouble with Full Bore is that while it’s over-spilling with puzzles to solve and has a few neat and novel ideas tucked up its sleeve, the game does little to welcome the player into its world. The control system is clumsy, leaving basic navigation feeling clunky and counter-intuitive even after several hours of play. Too often frustration sets in when a botched control input causes an unintended avalanche, ruining several minutes of painstaking tile manipulation. The rewind function goes some way to alleviating this particular issue but it remains a constant annoyance throughout the game.
The puzzles themselves are generally quite clever but unless the player is determined to mine every scrap of available gameplay, there’s little incentive to complete the more fiendish ones. For the most part, puzzles do not need to be solved to move forward in the game, which has the effect of breaking the challenge-reward system integral to so many puzzle classics. Not only do they offer scant in-game recompense, Full Bore’s puzzles just don’t tickle the brain’s pleasure centres in quite the same way as games like Thomas Was Alone or Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. This is compounded by the fragmented non-linear storytelling and rather directionless flow of gameplay, leaving the player feeling adrift and robbing them of a sense of real progress.
Full Bore is an ambitious title that occasionally impresses with its ingenuity but that ultimately falls a bit flat. While a number of other high profile indie games have succeeded in spite of their gameplay lacking a certain something – Bastion for one – Full Bore doesn’t have the charm or vision to overcome its lack of direction. For the die-hard puzzle fan, there’s certainly fun to be had but the less dedicated may well find their attention wandering after an hour or two.