Magrunner: Dark Pulse - Now you're thinking with polarity.

(as always, any feedback is appreciated!)

It really cannot be overstated how much Portal made an impact to gaming when released in 2007. Valve snatched up a few Digipen students, gave it that high quality Valve polish and released it as part of The Orange Box. The game was considered tertiary to the rest of The Orange Box – the more hyped games being the long-awaited Team Fortress 2 and the continuation of the Half-Life 2 saga – but Portal somehow became that surprise smash hit that started making small waves in the puzzle platforming genre.

In the years following, a fair share of games would copy Portal’s first-person perspective but try it with different ideas. Antichamber did puzzle-solving in impossible spaces. Quantum Conundrum involved shifting between dimensions to affect objects in the world. Even something like The Ball had the titular ball be used to solve tricky puzzles. But I couldn’t think of a puzzle game that involved gravity and polarity. Until now.

(He looks like Cole MacGrath from InFAMOUS' dorkier half-brother. Cover courtesy of Mobygames.)

Enter Magrunner: Dark Pulse. A first-person puzzle platformer that involves polarity and gravity to solve puzzles. Released in 2013 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, it’s another one of those puzzle platformers that involve shooting objects to solve puzzles.

This was developed by 3AM Games, a small development studio based in Kyiv, Ukraine. They had done contract work with Frogwares, the developers of the myriad of Sherlock Holmes games. Funded on the crowdfunding site Ulele, they received €110,000 in funding, just barely hitting their €100,000 goal. With some help from Frogwares and distributor Focus Home Interactive, they were able to make this game a reality. As far as I know, this would end up being 3AM’s last known project, as most of the team joined Frogwares proper not long after. 

I had gotten this for free on GOG not long after its release, and had mostly thrown it into The Pile that is my neverending backlog. Struggling to figure out a game to play, I let The Backloggery’s Fortune Cookie feature do its magic, and it picked this. Though I opted to use my Steam copy, of which I don’t remember when I got it. Maybe around the same time as I snagged the GOG edition. So if you’re wondering why this game might be in your game library, that might be it.

(2 Unlimited not included.)

You play as Dax Ward, an orphaned child whose parents died rather unexpectedly. Being mentored by a mutant scientist named Gamaji, Ward enters a contest to be one of the first people to use MagTech’s space training program, sponsored by LifeNet, a major social media conglomerate. Everything goes smoothly, until the power starts malfunctioning and people slowly are dying. Dax must survive and get to the bottom of this mess by solving puzzles involving polarity.

(The polarity in action. It almost looks like Christmas!)

If you’ve played Portal, most of Magrunner’s mechanics will make sense pretty quickly. Dax has two polarity colors – Red and Green by default, though they can be changed to any color – of which he can put onto objects highlighted in yellow. Much like physics and polarity, two objects of the same color will often stick together, while two objects with different colors will repel them away from each other.

Throughout Dax’s journey through the catastrophe, he’ll solve a multitude of polarity puzzles, flinging boxes, using platforms, trying to avoid turrets that’ll shoot him on contact – sorry, these ones don’t talk with a cutesy voice – all the typical puzzle platformer stuff.

(This section required me to bring three platforms to an ideal height so I could jump off the box at the top. This... took a while.)

While it does keep the relative simplicity of Portal’s two object rule, the gravity and physics stuff takes a lot of getting used to. Often times Dax will need to move a platform, which often requires to make the platform and the switch handling the lift be on different polarities, which is tough if it’s a vertical lift.

Sometimes a box is needed to solve a certain section or to hit a switch, and that’s a tricky challenge as it reacts to polarities as well, which means one has to avoid hitting a box with the opposite polarity of the platform, otherwise it’ll fly off. Boxes do respawn infinitely, but it can be a frustrating experience to try to transport these to make progress in a later section, or if you have to use them to propel yourself across an arena. Worse if they’re explosive boxes, as they’ll instantly kill Dax if one’s not careful.

(Newton: Helpful in some cases, a bane in others.)

Halfway through he’ll acquire Newton, a pet dog that can be used to put polarity on other objects outside of the prerequisite platforms and boxes.  In one stage I used Newton to help carry a box over to a different area by constantly shooting him on the walls so the box would travel with him. Other times I had to use Newton to reverse polarity so Dax can move faster off platforms or hold an endlessly moving platform in place.

Parts of Magrunner feel very Portal-esque at first. Dax moves from test chamber to test chamber through elevators, the test chambers are very clean and scientific like Portal’s Aperture Science test chambers. So far you’d expect that it’s gonna be similar to that, right?

(Yeah, something definitely has gone wrong here.)

Well, naturally like some of these games, suddenly everything goes wrong. As Dax goes further into the arenas, he ends up finding a lot of eldritch horrors scribbled on the walls and dilapidated chambers. No “cake is a lie” stuff here, this is outright horrific in spots.

As Dax plunges further into the facility, he finds out that the Magrunner technology was based on some old cult that praised Cthulhu, that weird eldritch god created by H.P. Lovecraft.  At some point he stumbles upon some of the monsters that lie in the water, which adds onto that horror element. This happening in real time gives me vibes from stuff like Half-Life, where everything seems normal until something tragic happens and you’re fighting to survive.

I genuinely wasn’t expecting there to be references to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos in here. It’s not really used all that much, and I assume elements of this game are meant to evoke something from a similar universe, but it really seems out of place here. (Admittedly, I have not read anything by H.P. Lovecraft, so this may be more than a passing reference to his work. I wouldn't know for certain.)

(I mean, at least there's other characters to talk to? A shame Dax never meets them in person.)

There isn’t much to say about Dax Ward as a character. He’s often worried and concerned as the world’s collapsing around him, and there’s no other characters that Dax interacts with outside of the Magrunner glove. In a sense it gives a deep sense of dread as he has to figure out how to escape while also solving the mystery of what’s going on.

(This... is a bit much.)

My general issue with puzzle platformers is that they sometimes require patience and good timing to successfully complete them. If I can’t figure it out, I get frustrated by doing constant trial-and-error ideas and get so frustrated when it doesn’t go right. Magrunner is no exception. Several of the puzzles were so obtuse that I had to look at guides to figure out the solution. I feel a bit of shame admitting that, but one of the tricks of a good puzzle platformer is just testing it so that players don’t feel they need to do unusual solutions to solve a test.

(Should've given me the chance to sprint from this guy, game.)

Magrunner also tries to be a bit more action oriented towards the end, with not just turrets but some monsters that have to be avoided, otherwise Dax will die. The downside is that Dax cannot sprint, thus making dodging enemies difficult in some cases. Thankfully bunnyhopping seems to work just fine.

I’ll refrain from really giving any more plot spoilers, but it does go a bit more off the rails towards the end than what I've mentioned. Basically lots of horror vibes that make this a bit unsettling if you're not expecting it. This game definitely gets that M for Mature rating.

(No cakes to be found here.)

Magrunner: Dark Pulse is a perfectly tolerable game. It has its quirks, as do most puzzle games, but I feel the Cthulhu stuff was kinda tacked on, and in a post-Portal world, it’s hard to really make a first-person puzzle platformer that doesn’t take pages from Valve’s game. Thus it kinda stands in the shadow of Portal. Though in spite of that, it's still an alright game. It kinda makes me want to look more into Frogwares' catalog, maybe actually try one of those Sherlock Holmes games that people keep talking about.

If you’re into these kind of puzzle platformers, it’s definitely worth a try. It's on Steam and on GOG for $20, which is a bit of a hard sell at that price, so I'd wait until it goes on sale if you want another puzzle platformer in your collection. Just be forewarned that Magrunner can get a bit frustrating, so don’t go into this expecting it to be easy. Magnets and polarity are a bit more complex than Portal's uh, portals, after all. 

Honestly, I think I need to play some more of these puzzle platformers. First-person or not, there’s something enjoyable about these kind of games, that they’re willing to experiment with stuff that where you could learn something about physics and science from. Now I kinda want something like this, but with less Cthulhu and more cutesy stuff.