Replaced Demo

The Unreal engine is very versatile, but the latest version hasn’t been adopted all that often. Replaced aims to correct that oversight and its makers have put the engine to good use. The game is a first person puzzle adventure, with a simple mechanic and a lot of potential.

The genre of FPS puzzle games dates back for the first Myst games, but it never really caught on as a fully interactive experience until the release of the first Portal title. Since then we have quite a few attempts in this genre, and most of them were quite good. Fortunately, Replaced also has a lot of promise, but we’ll have to wait quite a while until we are able to play the full game.

You take the role of a pilot, Leika Antaris, that crashes on an unknown planet. She needs to find a way to survive and escape. She finds an alien temple and a weird weapon that allows her to interchange her place with certain objects. 

The game is basically a collection of different rooms that are organized as puzzles. In order to move to the next room, you need to solve the puzzle. The gameplay is straightforward, and it shouldn’t present any major problems, even to beginners.

The players can only walk, run, jump, and use that weapon. There are no aliens, and the players have a limited number of possible actions. Even so, there are quite a few permutations, and things can get complicated really quick. On the other hand, the demo is very short, and it only shows what the game could do.

It’s clear that choosing the Unreal engine is always a good idea, and Replaced looks great. It still needs some work, especially with water effects and shiny surfaces, but overall it’s a nice experience.

The level design is also quite good, but it’s hard to properly judge that without a proper challenge. The demo is quite short, so it won’t take players a long time to go through it.