I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT THE BRADWELL CONSPIRACY

My first "hard core" gaming experience was... the demo to Half-Life 2. I had downloaded it to my barely functional Toshiba Satellite, thinking I could apply the same exploit to make it the full game as was possible with Portal - dash game portal if memory serves - but it didn't work. Portal was tiny, making a seperate demo wasn't worth it when you could just download the entire game and make it stop halfway through.

I had to make due with the two levels you could play in the demo - the first one, Welcome to City 17, and the zombie level, We Don't Go To Ravenholm. It was the first time I had a character hold a gun, a real gun - not one that shoots crossdimensional gateways, but one that could kill.

At age 12, I don't think I was ready for that. The game became everything I talked about, always watchful to not mention it to my parents who at the time didn't understand video games and saw the for the time pretty realistic violence as just that, violence. It wasn't Gordon Freeman who had murdered hundreds of zombies with all manner of grenades, shotguns, and whatever else I could hurl at the creatures using my gravity gun, it was me.

I'm not here to adjudicate whether or not videogames cause violence, I think we all know by now that that discussion yields no new insight - but I will wonder what caused me to identify so much with an MIT graduate with a PhD in theoretical physics. It certainly wasn't his blasé attitude towards the alien invasion that surrounded him, or being hired by a man in black whose motive we can only speculate about - in fact, it wasn't at all about him. You aren't Gordon Freeman. Instead, Gordon Freeman is you.

The topic has been discussed to death and back, and make no mistake, it certainly wasn't Valve's invention. The voiced protagonist is, in fact, a pretty new invention. Some sources claim it was Dragon's Lair, although that game's use of classic hand-made animation through LaserDisc may disqualify it on that count. By 1987, in Metal Gear for the MSX2, voiced protagonists were still not en vogue. In part because games just weren't that complex yet, in part because voice - even compressed to fit into a 24 Kilobyte tape - was just too much data to spend a big chunk of the medium.

CD-ROMs changed all that. Suddenly, you had 700 Megabytes available, at a time where most people didn't even have half of that as a hard drive. Myst was lauded at it's release for using incredibly high fidelity visuals. It was because they had the space available.

Still, Half-Life, released well into the CD-ROMs life, didn't voice its protagonist. They voiced other characters, sure, but never Gordon. Never the character you're supposed to play. It's not that Gordon himself is an everyman, it's that his life does not get in the way. You accept that he never speaks because it's easier for the writer if he doesn't - and in that, he's like any other convenience. I don't think that canonically, within the world of Half-Life, there's a numerical counter for his health, measured in 1-100, and we don't worry about who puts a single magazine of 9mm ammunition in the wooden crates.

So naturally, it feels weird to me when a game tries to explain this.

The Bradwell Conspiracy was one of the first "big budget" releases on Apple Arcade. It remained exclusive for a while, but it was also released on Steam, PS4, Xbox and Switch not long after. It's a little Portal, a little Firewatch, a little Stanley Parable, a little Control - but unfortunately it doesn't become something greater or even comparable to its parts. The game prides itself on its team of BAFTA luminaries and industry icons - including developers that have worked on beloved and iconic series like Fable, Batman Arkham and Tomb Raider. It's a real shame that The Bradwell Conspiracy isn't much fun to experience, both as a story and as a game.

On the subject of protagonists, the game suffers from what I call the Destiny problem. Your character isn't voiced, but your sidekick - a pair of Bradwell Electronics smart glasses named Guide - is.

Right from the first scene, before you even get to move, Guide tells you that you can't speak because your larynx was injured from smoke inhalation. This is even before you even understand what happened - an explosion at the Stonehenge Museum built by the Bradwell Foundation knocked you, a regular everyman museum visitor at the gala announcing the foundation's clean water initative, out and rubble is blocking the exit. Your guide glasses scan you - however they do that - and diagnose you with Freeman syndrome. No talking, to no one.

That doesn't mean you're unable to communicate. Your only confidante, Amber, a disgruntled Bradwell employee, can look through your eyes if you send her a picture from your glasses. Aside from communication, this also serves as one of the two key mechanics to solving the puzzles the game shows you. The other one is a handheld 3D printer MacGuffin that can scan and make things from Substance or "Bradwellium", the plot fuel of the game. This is already a setup for a great puzzle game with lots of twists. It's mostly used for subpar platforming.

Once you fall into the secret R&D facility below the Stonehenge Museum, you're given the impression that this is a massive sprawling underground refuge for crazed scientists of all types. What it amounts to is a series of winding corridors that all look the same.

Your objective is simple: Escape. After all, the museum above was bombed, and you'd like to leave it behind as soon as possible. For a reason that's never explained, the main entrance is locked, as is the private train that brings Bradwell employees from and to London down to the facility. The only option, Amber tells you, is to get to the medical sector of the facility and board one of the evacuation pods that are supposed to bring the injured outside to safety.

The museum Guide can't do much except exposit cheery dialogue, so your first course of action is to get hired under a false name. You pick up the glasses that belong to the guy that was supposed to start today, and make your way to the onboarding course, which teaches you the basics of the company: Bradwell Electronics makes... electronics, unsurprisingly, but have recently discovered a form of programmable matter they named, even more unsurprisingly, Bradwellium. Bradwellium can be manipulated by a handheld 3D printer that's not further elaborated on - The corp uses it to produce all manner of objects, but it's not abundant enough to be everywhere. In fact, the onboarding obstacle course will be the most Bradwellium you'll see until the final boss fight.

Once you get through the parcours, you return to the lobby, a new path now open to you. Through the security office you make it to "your floor", the research department where the guy who owns the glasses is supposed to work. You intend to leave with the lift, but the power is out, so you assemble a bioreactor from parts you can print. When it's done making power, it opens a tiny portal that's leaking the same reddish dust that Bradwellium bricks are made from. Amber tells you to disregard it.

The way to Medical now open, you keep hearing about other Bradwell projects, including the NARAC study. Despite being deeply involved in Bradwellium production and synthesis, Amber doesn't know what that is. But, you don't have to worry about that, you just need to find the parts that fix the escape pod.

Continuing to steal other people's glasses and printing whatever you can find, you make it to a lab in medical containing a server. Through some truly awful platforming you reset the device to diagnostics mode, and steal the "super powerful" Bradwellium data core right out of the machine. This yields you the blueprints you need to fix the pod, and also reveals that NARAC is a project involving ingesting Substance to see what it does. A global surveillance system named Aequus is also mentioned, but barely elaborated on.

At the pod, you realise the computer meant to steer it is missing, and that it's on the CEO's computer. Through complete coincidence, the employee's Guide you last picked up opens the door to the Bradwell's underground home, which is inexplicably in the medical section. There, you get sent the code to Melissa Bradwell's private panopticon office tower out of nowhere by Amber, and at the top, find John Bradwell's Guide glasses. These should open all locks and doors, and you find the blueprint for the computer on Melissa's computer, which also has a honeypot file on it that triggers an alarm if you click it. Whether you do or not doesn't matter, because you run back to the evac station, print the computer and the lid, sit in the pod and leave.

Unfortunately, this is where the game remembered there had to be a plot, so Melissa stops your pod and reveals that Amber was the one that planted the bomb at the museum. She gives a half-assed apology and a quarter-assed explanation that if she didn't, Melissa would have taken over the world using her surveillance network and that she had to stop her. Since you have no agency or say in the matter, you're running like a rat through the maze that is the utility corridors of Bradwell R&D, until you're crawling through a vent, which buckles and sends you falling right into the Aequus control centre, because of course it does.

There, Amber instructs you to disable the system, which you can only do by turning it on first. When you do, it is revealed that through the drinking water the Bradwell Foundation Clean Water Initiative provides, everyone on Earth is meant to unwittingly ingest trace amounts of Bradwellium, which crosses the blood-brain-barrier and allows the system to read people's thoughts and see through their eyes. Upon hearing this, Amber panics and drops three F-bombs, the only ones in the game, and you work together to disable the data cores like you did in the medical section. After that, it's revealed that the system is already online, and that the only way to truly stop it is to stop the production of Bradwellium. Conveniently, the Bradwellium mine is located next door.

At the mine, you see the origin of Bradwellium - a wormhole, a portal to another world that's a desert entirely composed of Bradwellium dust, with what looks like Stonehenge in the background. You use a mining laser to destroy the wormhole stabilisers in a puzzle boss fight so terrible it might genuinely put the Bed of Chaos to shame, the portal closes, you barely make it to the lift taking you out of the mines, and the game... ends.

If you thought that was an abrupt ending, you've just had the same experience as I have. There's no explanation for anything, the fact that Bradwellium is from another world isn't even mentioned in the dialogue, and you're left to piece most of the plot together yourself, mainly because despite doing everyone's dirty work, you actually have no agency in the story whatsoever. You're just a robot, running around, and while the game does let you photograph anything, and Amber will comment on it, it's very easy to forget that the mechanic is there.

And I have to add that I like this game, despite everything. That's not an endorsement, because it is quite poorly designed and executed, but I personally have a soft spot for games like this. A mystery, with an artistic vibe to it, that you're supposed to uncover with the help of someone you don't even know if you can trust. It's why Control is one of my favourite games, and it's why I love games like Firewatch, Alan Wake, Disco Elysium, Return of the Obra-Dinn, the Professor Layton series - and that's what I was looking forward to. And let's not forget, that is what this game should be. By all accounts, every piece is there - but it just... fails.

One thing you probably can't see in gameplay footage is that the controls just feel... off. They're obviously designed to be played with a controller, but they do allow mouse and keyboard. Everything feels floaty and unresponsive, and that's even worse on the Mac version, and there's a noticeable delay between when I press the mouse button and when the printer actually plays the animation and prints.

That also extends to the literal key bindings. You can't jump in The Bradwell Conspiracy, presumably because the environments are so restrictive it wouldn't have made much of a difference, so the photo button is spacebar. I've taken more photos accidentally than ones I wanted to take, and it doesn't help that every single photo triggers a voice line from Amber.

On the subject of voice lines, many critics praised the direction of the voice acting in this game, and I'm sorry if I just have to disagree here. Despite having blown up a museum around one of the most well-known cultural heritage sites in the world, despite falling at least four stories, despite being trapped in the place she never wanted to return to, Amber constantly maintains a cheery outlook and demeanor, to an uncomfortable degree. This could have worked if it was just a façade, but with Amber, I can't pick up on that. It only makes the one time when she does lose her shit so much more jarring. The Guide glasses are also voiced, and I can't help but wish there would have been a little more technological flair in his voice too. After all, he's an AI running on a pair of Meta Ray Bans.

The graphics are another point of contention. I didn't count, but I'm willing to believe there's less than 30 textures in the game. Geometry is similarly limited. This is most likely a holdover from the game being developed to work with pre-M1 Apple Silicon, so processing power was limited, which was turned into a stylistic choice. I get why, but while this game tries to imitate the low-poly style of Firewatch and The Witness, it fails because these games benefitted from interesting environments realised within this style. There's not many ways you can make office and laboratory corridors interesting. A hyper-realist style like in Control would have done a lot more to tickle those liminal-space-receptors in my brain, but again, that's probably infeasible given the hardware it was designed for.

The humour is also pretty bad. Most of the jokes are delivered poorly, and the few visual gags that are there fall flat because of the clear specificity - to build a joke in a world this low-poly you have to make your gags stick out like sore thumbs. You can tell that the writers were proud of some of the jokes, especially in the employee orientation area, but they are rarely more than "evil corporation is very aware that they are evil but choose to do it anyways". Another reason why Amber shouldn't really be surprised at the state of affairs.

Earlier I said I like this game. I don't think that is what I meant to say - I think I find it charming. It's disappointingly bad at gameplay, annoyingly bad at graphics, laughably bad at controls and embarrassingly bad at character writing. I guess I could say it trailers nicely, but that's really only a kudos for the marketing team at Apple that clearly must've never played a video game before, which... okay, point taken.

Still, I don't want to say that this is a bad game. The Bradwell Conspiracy is by all accounts irredeemable. It needed more time, it needed more people, it needed more performance available to its developers, and it needed a desperate rework of the controls, but... I can see that this is someone's passion project.

But so are tons of other games that are far better, and those didn't get carte blanche from Apple.

The Bradwell Conspiracy gets a 3/10.