Dyad: The Review

I’ve been playing Dyad off and on, and mostly I’ve found myself torn because the game mechanics itself are rock-solid and a lot of fun… but everything else surrounding this game makes my knuckles itch to punch somebody, anybody, involved with this game.

Seriously, I have played Animal Crossing games that are less aggressively twee and met conceptual artists who were less smug. The file size is 1337 MB, deliberately. His company is spelled ][ and pronounced Right Square Bracket Left Square Bracket. He announced his game on the PlayStation Blog as “being certified by the FDA” with the FDA being the Fun and Diversion Administration.

To be fair, the graphics, although awful, are not part of this twee-ness. They’re the result of McGrath trying to make a game without art assets since he’s a one-man shop right now: He was limited to what graphics tools gave him. So while they manage to be both cliche and eye-bleeding at times, that isn’t his fault.

All that said, in terms of gameplay, this game is pretty much absolutely everything you’ve heard and a side of fries. It starts out as a fairly standard tube racer but rapidly adds new ideas and mechanics, becoming more of a puzzle game as it progresses. By the end of the game what you’re playing has become something unrecognizable.

Do I recommend buying this game? With the terrible graphics, with the fact that every time Shawn McGrath opens his mouth my knuckles itch and Dyad being successful will likely just make him worse?

Abso-frickin’-lutely. Getting past all that, this is one of the best games I’ve played all year. If you own a PS3, you owe it to yourself to give this game a shot.

image courtesy Sony

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