App Review: Father And Son

Time to get your arty face on!

The app I'm reviewing today is Father And Son, an interactive journey through time. That sounds awfully dramatic, but that's kind of what they attempted here. There are some games that will keep you busy for months, or at least weeks. Father And Son is not that kind of game, and it's not meant to be. It's not even a ten-minute time-waster. It's basically a short, artistically done interactive tale.

Even the font is great!

You get to be in the
museum in the game!

This game was published by Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Assuming your Italian is as crap as mine, it roughly translates to National Archeological Museum of Naples. A museum publishing a game?! I know, right? Still, stranger things have happened.

The Premise

Your character in the game is the titular "son", whose father has just died. This game brings him to Naples, where he explores the art that was his father's life.

The Aesthetics

Aesthetics are just about everything in a game, or even in apps generally. It's one of the first things you notice. As aesthetics go, Father And Son is one of the most beautiful games ever made for mobile. For real, I think they won an award or something.

Gorgeous.

The graphics - sprites, background, the works - are digitized paintings. In fact, the whole damn game looks like a gallery! The sound effects and music are nothing to sniff at either, going from whimsical and calm to rousing at the credits. It's like they hired an entire orchestra just for this! I approve. Father And Son obviously set great store by presentation, and on this alone, it scores massive points.

The Experience

This is where things start getting a bit draggy. Other than move left and right, and look at stuff, you don't really get to do much in this game. Sure, there are groovy sequences where you can move back and forth between scenes in time. It's all very artistic, definitely... one just wishes there was more content.

Move left, move right, draw stuff...

The Interface

Father And Son manages to do even this elegantly. Action icons (hand-drawn, no less) appear when your avatar is near something he can interact with, and fade away when he moves off. Moving left and right is just a simple matter of tapping (and holding) on either side of the screen.

Nice and neat.

What I liked

Graphics and sound. I've gushed enough about it. Moving on.

Elegant interface. Seriously, many apps could stand to pick up a thing or two from Father And Son's very minimalist and uncluttered, yet intuitive user interface.

A scene back in ancient Egypt.

Another scene back in ancient Egypt.

The travelling back-and-forth in time via flashback at the user's discretion, is actually a great idea. Too bad they managed to do so little with it.

Nice Easter Eggs, in the form of unlockable content, that can be uncovered if your phone's location is anywhere near the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. That's pretty neat!

What I didn't

This is a very short game. It'll take you a couple hours to finish, tops.

Family drama.

Subject matter is kind of mawkish. Basically, the son blames the father for neglecting his family, takes a few days to explore his father's life when the father dies, and at the end of the game, writes him a letter either sympathizing with him or condemning him.

Uninspiring dialogue.

Nothing to write home about.

Dialogue choices aren't that interesting, and don't affect the game at all. No, seriously. You can generally choose between two personalities when selecting your dialogue (polite or cynical) and at some point one tends to wonder why the game creators even bothered.

In fact, the game is very linear despite the nifty time-switch thing they implemented.

Pretty street... now try
walking along it.

There are scenes that require you to walk from one end of a very long stretch to the other. For the first one, they included a motorbike for the avatar to use, but you don't get so lucky later on. And once you get over how gorgeous the scenery is, all this virtual walking starts to grate on the nerves. It gets repetitive and tiresome.

Conclusion

This is a very beautiful game (there, I said it again) but as far as gameplay goes, it's not much of a game at all. Father And Son has some pretty good ideas; unfortunately they're let down by the discernible lack of content. That said, it's certainly short enough that no one can ever accuse it of wearing out its welcome.

My Rating

6 / 10

Son-sational effort!
T___T