Four Sided Fantasy Review

A leisurely stroll through a park packed with obstacles is the best way to describe the experience of Four Sided Fantasy. It looks pretty but it will have you scratching your head as you ask yourself, ‘how do I even get there?’. Whether you need to get past a pillar, go up a floor level or climb a rock chasm, the screen wrap gameplay is the answer. The story has some rather Romeo & Juliet style vibes going on, you discover a strange world where a woman and man journey through the four seasons constantly separated by the boundaries of the screen, in hopes to finally come together.

Throughout this two-hour experience, using the screen as your frame, you need to hold the frame in place at the correct points in order to progress, jump out the left side of the screen and appear on the right side as long as there is space on the corresponding side, not a brick wall as  you cannot walk through walls. The same would be if you drop down out of the frame, you would jump back in at the top, this whole mechanic leads to some well-thought out, mind-boggling puzzles. Thankfully death is not a penalty as you simply respawn in the exact same area. Now I’m not an expert when it comes to solving puzzles in games, sometimes it will come naturally and other times I want to cry, I found myself taking a moment to think several times but never spent too long pondering before coming up with the answer.

At the core, the gameplay is smooth and doesn’t feel disjointed at all, it just fits right in. In the different seasons a new mechanic is added that creates even more possibilities, one season your weaving between the background and foreground and another your switching between floor running and ceiling running. It reinvents the way you think about the screen wrap feature which helps in keeping you focused and not become complacent. After the first few moments of being told what the three buttons to use are, there are no following tutorials to guide you along the way, this is however easily forgiven due to easy nature of being able to work out how the new feature works almost instantly.

Remember when I said you cannot walk through walls, well that’s not entirely true, unless you encounter a bug that is, which I unfortunately did, It only happened twice, the one forced me to restart the level I was on and the other actually got me further into the level. This only happened when using the screen wrap feature, I ended up jumping into a wall and I’m thankful that the bug didn’t happen more often, which could have certainly been the case.

Boasting a stunning, crisp art style that uses a natural colour palette you certainly wouldn’t be remiss to think your watching an artistic animated short feature instead of an actual game. You could just stop dead in your tracks at any moment and take in the beauty of what you’re witnessing. The background, foreground and characters blend seamlessly together on the screen with nothing looking out-of-place. The ambient soundtrack by MJ Quigley brings the gameplay and visuals together for a true visual and auditory experience, from the chilling and almost eerie sounds of the winter season to the calm and lifting melody of summer.

Upon completion you are rewarded with a New Game+ mode that allows you to replay the story with altered screen wrap visuals that once again reinvents the experience. Aside from this when it comes to replayability there really isn’t anything else, unless you wish to look for the secret areas and try to complete the game using as little frames and screen wrap jumps as possible in order to get all the trophies. Best described as a one and done style game, a joyful experience which would be rarely revisited. It’s beautiful, it’s seamless, it’s fun. Behind the minor bugs and limited replayability is a truly unique fascinating experience that’s easy on the eyes and the ears. Lupo Land really nailed what a 2D puzzle-platforming short-game should be.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 4 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.