Remember being a kid and finding part of a toy that was separate from the rest of the toy? For me it was the little lightsabers and blasters that came with Star Wars action figures. I’d dump my LEGO toy box out and find Han Solo’s blaster. I knew what the blaster was, and I knew what it belonged to, I just needed to look around my room and find the box I kept my Star Wars toys in.
Possessions (available now on Apple Arcade) tasks players with a similar feat: move through a handful of rooms and orient yourself so that the seemingly random objects find their proper place in the scene.
A picture frame, for example, may be split and part of it is floating in the middle of the room. Players must spin and angle their view of the room so that, from their perspective, the picture frame appears whole. Once the illusion is completed, the illusion warps into reality and the player moves onto the next object in the room that needs fixing.
When I said “a handful” I really did mean that. There are only three chapters in Possessions, and each chapter has 10 or 12 levels each. I had two-thirds of the game completed when I first decided to check how long the game was. I was dismayed to find myself so near the end of the game so soon.
If the puzzles had been a bit more challenging, I wouldn’t have minded the brevity of the experience. Unfortunately the puzzles were so simple that I breezed through every level. Floating piano keys? Wonder where they go. Floating bicycle seat? Wonder where it goes. The only difficulty came with abstract objects. Coming across those few objects was the only challenge I faced in the game. The majority of the puzzles are dull to solve, due to their common-sense solutions.
Possessions had these cinematic, story segments where the player watches a family do stuff within the rooms that are about to become the puzzles, but there’s absolutely no explanation as to why the possessions are ripping apart. The segments were told using a slow-moving, photograph-like freeze frame so it was a bit hard to understand what I was looking at sometimes. At one point I was certain a man slapped his (I assume) girlfriend….or maybe it was a loving caress…when she walked over to him. The “story” was completely vapid, and I much would have rather the game came with more levels than such a strange attempt at creating a story.
I went into Possessions expecting to spend a few evenings solving perspective-based puzzles in a chill environment. Instead, my experience with the game lasted around 20 minutes and I found the overall chaos of the messy environments not as relaxing as I thought. One level took place in a bathroom infested with roaches. I wanted to relax, not be creeped out by bugs and pictures with faces crossed out.
Possessions has an AR mode, but I am not interested in it. I play games on my phone while I relax or am killing time when I’m out and about. AR aspects have very little interest to me. Nor do I necessarily want to put myself into an infested bathroom or the room of a young, potential serial killer.
Possessions didn’t feel like it was worth my time. When I got to the end I was left feeling nothing. Solving the puzzles felt like I was putting away the dishes. The game worked well, and it was a crisp experience from start to finish, albeit it was one I think you won’t regret skipping.
Possessions was reviewed using an Apple Arcade subscription maintained by Epic Brew.
