Nazar is an interesting piece of media, not-so-much a regular platformer or an FMV creation, but something in between.
This is a hard game to talk about because it’s doing stuff that I’ve never seen a video game really do before. That’s something, in 2024. Imagine being that fresh of a concept. Nazar is a Turkish developed game that delves a lot into mysticism, like palm reading and tarot-like cards. That part may be the most easy to understand, because the rest is very art house in concept.
Nazar is an FMV game, shot entirely on an iPhone. But it’s also not a typical FMV game in that it functions as a sort of platformer. The term platformer is doing a lot of heavy lifting because it doesn’t behave like one. The focus is time manipulation, in an almost multiversal kind of way. As we push the stick in a direction, our character moves along visible timelines that correlate to animations and actions, and we can fast forward and reverse, pause and wait, or speed through depending on our available abilities and what the timeline will allow. It’s represented in a white, squiggly line on screen, letting us see what might happen ahead. That power of foresight is what guides the whole experience, as both our character and the antagonists can utilize and manipulate it.
The timeline is broken because this evil group is splintering it, so our goal is to repair it, unifying these lines into one and changing the outcomes. An enemy might have a gun and we can’t get past them, for instance, but if we fix the timeline then they no longer have that weapon and we’ve essentially taking their power away.
Moving forward is essentially “reading the future,” and requires ESP. The cards we read build up our ESP, which is reduced every time we push forward. Every time we make a move we’re sort of guessing about the future; getting something wrong takes away more ESP but we can earn some as we make a correct move. And because of its rogue-like nature it allows us to understand how much we’ll need for the next run and the run after that, until we’re making enough of the right choices to get us through to the end.
The game is set from a 2D side view in much of it, so that we’re constantly moving forward, but it’s done so in this sort of shadow play style and it looks beautiful. It makes everything very striking and high contrast, and is used as a storytelling element with inspiration from classic, ancient folktales.
It’s doing some cool stuff. It’s got a cool concept but I don’t necessarily know that I’m having fun playing it. The gameplay doesn’t feel compelling enough. It’s really on the verge of just being a visual novel with almost a little too much mustard on it. But it’s so compelling that I could power through some of the eye roll gameplay elements and stuff. I don’t think it’s the kind of game that’s meant to be “fun” in the traditional sense anyways.
There’s kind of nothing like Nazar out there. Recontact Games have made something really unique.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for November 19, 2024. Images and video courtesy Publisher.
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