‘Blackwood Crossing’ Is a Touching Story Tangled Up In a Messy Game

The first console and PC project from Brighton-based indie studio PaperSeven, Blackwood Crossing is a narrative adventure in which the player must solve (mostly) simple puzzles in order to progress a story tailored to tug at the heartstrings. I can confirm that, on the latter front, it's eventually a success. But the road to that point is rough, and illustrative of how plot-focussed projects can sometimes neglect how they play, damagingly so.

As driven by it as it is, I daren't dive too deeply into Blackwood Crossing's story, or even say anything about its title, because of serious spoiler potential. But it's alright to say that the "you" of the adventure, 14-year-old Scarlett, is going to pass through a multitude of emotions between starting her surreal journey and its beautiful moonlit climax. You'll take in a train and a tree house, a few "versions" of them in fact, and also a mysterious island setting where proceedings take a particularly dark turn. Much is said about family, unlikely friends and allies, and the consequences our actions in life have both for those around us and those we leave behind.

You can finish Blackwood Crossing in a single sitting of two and a half to three hours. And I recommend taking that approach to it, so that it takes on an almost movie-like quality, much like Virginia and Gone Home have in the past. Like those games, there's a lot of walking involved—which some may find too slow—and simple interactions with useable collectibles, as well as conversational options (gentle, sarcastic or bossy reactions) that have no bearing on the game's outcome but allow you to slightly adapt Scarlett's character to your liking. She also discovers that she can use some supernatural powers, which prove essential for removing a not-terrifically-explained black mist that blocks her way on several occasions.

Additionally, there are elementary logic puzzles—cueing voice-over clips in the right order to unlock the next section is a mechanic used perhaps one time too many—and children's games like hide and seek and the old "warmer, warmer still, hot, burning" variant of it. You know the one. You'll get them all pretty quickly, if you've ever been a child.

And that all sounds great. But it's just not held together well enough to make Blackwood Crossing one of those drop-what-you're-doing recommendations that pop out of the independent sphere with increasing regularity. There's a messiness to its presentation, a clumsiness to its movement, that just keeps sticking in the craw, stopping the player from truly relating to the game's central cast and their relationships. PaperSeven numbers 14 staffers, so this isn't the "smallest" breed of indie game, the kind put together by just a couple of dedicated developers. It's from people with considerable triple-A experience, too, some from the defunct Black Rock, makers of Pure and Split/Second. With that in mind, I just… expected more, I guess.

Which sounds harsh, doesn't it? Here's a new studio, with its first console game, and I'm down on it because it's not as glossy as something a triple-A team would put together. But truthfully, while it looks great at a cursory glance, and the art style's very attractive, it's not as polished as many games I've played that have come from significantly smaller teams with substantially less experience. To the extent where I am genuinely surprised it's coming out when it is, and not after another month or two of refinements.

The UI here is tetchy, to be kind. Scarlett's exaggerated, could-prove-nauseating bobbing motion—which will be familiar to those who played 2016's Layers of Fear, but at least you could turn it off in that game—making reticle placement a continuous frustration. Hovering it over interactive items is all well and good, but they'll only become active when it's just in the right spot. If there's some other part of the game happening, like someone talking, that "press X to pick up" function will stay locked, until they've said their piece—which, again, does nothing whatsoever for the natural flow of proceedings.

And doesn't it flow slowly? (It does, the question is rhetorical, don't @ me.) The voice acting is largely perfunctory, the performers in the roles of Scarlett and her brother Finn, Rosie Jones and Kit Conner, left to do the heavy lifting but finding it a stretch. The scenes in which you have to trigger supporting characters' repeated lines in a specific order are easy enough to work out but take too long to successfully execute, with later ones necessitating what feel like lengthy walks between interactions. That the lines themselves are devoid of much situation-specific feeling makes their repetition all the more annoying.

Some of the environmental assets—train posters in particular—almost give the game's ending away within its first hour. And equally maddening—from a design front—is how the game won't let you pick up certain things until another character has explicitly told you where they are, even when you know you need them and they're right in front of you.

There's a scene that requires Scarlett to pick up sticky tape and a pair of scissors. I found them both straight away, but could only hold the former until the other character in the room was coerced into telling me precisely where they were. That's just bad design—you have to accommodate for the fact that the player might be "ahead of the game", so to speak, and have it respond accordingly. Later, one of the final puzzles just throws logic away entirely. It's easily enough solved if you simply walk around the area, pointing Scarlett at anything that might be interactive, but in terms of Common Sense, it's just, no. If I'd been testing this, pre-release, I'd have flagged that immediately as something that desperately needed attention.

But then, this game world isn't the real world, or a representation of it, as everything in Blackwood Crossing is designed to be weird, if not quite wonderful (although it sure wears an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland influence on its sleeve, with repeated visual references to following a white rabbit). Thus, you can forgive its brainteasers not adhering to relatable rules, to an extent. But even with that generosity, these passages just don't make for fun gameplay. The game is forever fiddly, irritating where it shouldn't be, to the detriment of a good story; and by the time you finish—cue a pleasant little end-credits song by former Gomez member Ben Ottewell—the wanting to really like this game that you had going in has been replaced by a palpable feeling of relief that you're through it.

There's a genuinely touching tale here, as the small lump in my throat tells me during that credit roll. To wit, the payoff is just about worth the lumpiness, the awkward pushing up against walls and doors and people, the impression that the game is almost fighting against the player's best intentions, their desired directions, some of the time. But I'm a very patient player. Put this game in the hands of those demanding more immediate results, and even though it's a deliberately short experience, Blackwood Crossing is going to have many turning off before it's properly begun to articulate its affecting story. That's a real shame, but something that I hope that this new studio can learn from for whatever comes next.

Blackwood Crossing is available on PC from April 4th, and Xbox One and PlayStation 4 a day later.

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