Traumas

Ugly is a game with a dark theme, full of mysteries and quite bizarre. The first minutes of the gameplay didn't show me anything about the story directly, but rather through the background, with objects and drawings inserted into it, as if there were some memory there to be rescued.

What I managed to understand right away is that we have control of just one character, apparently a little boy, who wanders around in a “mirrored” world. In this, we learned the first mechanic, which is to create a clone of ourselves that walks and makes movements in the opposite direction to ours, bringing the mirror dynamics to life.

On purpose, the game already puts difficulties in our path for skills to be presented. The number of times I hit and ran into walls in this game are countless, but they proved necessary for me to learn and pass the level.

Therefore, “living mirrored” and even somewhat confused, my gameplay in Ugly was due to different mechanics and a lot of attention to discover how to complete the puzzles. Our goal is to unravel the mysteries behind the game while taking advantage of countless mechanically and graphically crafted phases.



Failed attempts

The beginning of the game is very simple. At first, a small scene that presents what the work's video and sound graphics are like. When we take control of the character, we don't have complicated controls, and we are presented with around three of them. It's very easy to handle them and get through the first phases (the secret is to memorize the controls and their functions, to try to get used to this mechanism).

The movements shown at the beginning are very clear, there is only one character, but he can duplicate himself and change bodies with his “soul”. I explain: the mystery of the work revolves around a man, who manages to “bring his soul” into the physical world, managing to cross walls, objects and even go outside the map. This way, he can perform actions that he normally would not be able to, due to the normal limitations of a human being.

Therefore, each type of control is suitable for each specific situation. For example, if I need to cross a wall, I will use duplication, have the blue character (the “soul”) pass through it, and then use body swapping. In this way, the game continues, with simple movements that, as we progress through the phases, become diverse and can be confusing.



Ugly is really cool to play, and I confess that it seems a lot more confusing than it is. At the beginning of the game I was still getting used to it and ended up making mistakes with the controls, causing me to lose the level (and I must thank the restart button, which consists of the character drinking something from a bottle, the scene starts to get restless and the level starts over ). But, as you progress in the game, practice becomes much smoother.

I'm used to playing platform games, and I really like this style, and I felt that Ugly has a lot of potential to be a great game for the public who also likes it. The fact that it has new mechanics and exorbitant graphics may end up pleasing even those who fell in with a parachute and became interested in the work.

Furthermore, it proves to be quite challenging. Even though it's not difficult, mechanically speaking, it's a title that needs to be thought about. Thinking about the best strategy, the best movement, the next step... is to play carefully and feel the entire experience it can provide, if you identify with it.



As I understood more about the game, I realized that the noble man's traumas are shown little by little as we pass the levels. It's quite visual, and when we find some clue, a cutscene soon starts that shows, in an exaggerated and strong way, something that the character has gone through and wants to get rid of.

The images, drawings and even the scene itself are very characteristic, and convey a very bad feeling of anguish. I tried to imagine and understand what those issues were, which happened in his childhood, and I felt sorry for him.

And it's curious that, following a stereotype, the character always tries to come out on top, to maintain this posture of strength and overcoming. But we can see that he is fragile, to the point of trying to hide when reliving a memory.

Even though it is a game without dialogue or subtitles, it has touching and strong music, as well as a lot of movement. Therefore, it is not a still, slow or boring game, it is actually quite cool to play and interesting due to its theme.



And, in the meantime, I must say that it doesn't seem to be very difficult either. The game has no automatic save system, which helps us not get stuck in stages and makes it easier to complete the puzzles, and also has several factors indicated in the levels - such as tips.

Something I noticed, which appears quite frequently, is the presence of drawings in the middle of the maps. Whenever it is a souvenir, these drawings appear duplicated, and we have to stay on top of each one with the main character and our clone.

Thus, a bad memory will be rescued and shown to the man, who expresses fear and rejection, wanting to escape from there. It's very sad to watch all this, it gave me a bad feeling and made me feel sorry and empathetic for the story told there. The sounds that play, the strong and distressing music, gave me the feeling that someone actually went through this and is being portrayed there.

This way, as the narrative progresses, I can see that this man's traumas involve his father. The father, who is always drawn larger than the other family members and with an expression of anger that does not change, possibly made him take actions that were not the boy's will and felt angry that he received affection from other people.



Ugly is a very heavy theme and it was well developed here. It's common for us to hear countless stories out there, and having this portrayed in a game was something very different in my view.

Arts and meanings

I believe that the first factor we look at when starting a game is its art. It's precisely the first thing we can see on the screen and, in Ugly, we have a very beautiful game, with very vivid and saturated graphics and colors, even with a grainy effect on the image (which just added an extra touch to the art ).

Thus, all the rest of the drawings spread throughout the levels are also very elaborate, in the same way as with the memories that we managed to rescue. The video graphics are super fluid and have excellent animations.

Furthermore, the game has very good music, which I ended up really liking even if it is meant to cause a feeling of horror and anguish. Particularly, I love it when these titles have piano sounds, I think it ends up bringing an ambience and the desired mood to that context, giving a very strong characterization.



That way, I really liked the sound graphics, but at times the music was too loud and I had to turn down the volume to continue seeing the scene that was playing. I believe it may be the intention of the game, that one song stands out compared to the rest of the elements, but it was something that I ended up not finding so cool.

Taking into account that the game asks for minimum requirements of 4 GB of RAM, Dual Core 3.0GHz processor and DirectX 10, 11 or 12 video card and I played on a PC with 16GB of RAM, Intel Core i5-9400F processor and graphics card. video GTX 1050 Ti, I didn't suffer any bugs or glitches, the game ran perfectly.

Thank you for the Ugly PC key provided to us by Team Ugly and Graffiti Games.