Review: FREERIDE is a narrative RPG that doubles as a personality test, but does it get a passing grade?

FREERIDE is a narrative RPG that has the appeal of being a personality test. Basically, this just means that your actions are judged by The Seer, who pops in every now and again amongst the chaos to be sassy and kind of rude.

The game starts with you boarding a spirit train and unravels fairly quickly. This game has a lot of paths and very few options to turn back, so it forces replayability by blocking off other routes. I’d love to give you lore and tell you what’s going on, but FREERIDE thrives on you being in the dark.

It wants you to learn by replaying, and while I don’t mind that for secrets, it’s kind of frustrating for those of us who don’t want to start back from zero several times to understand the full story. It might’ve been softened if we had any measure of understanding during gameplay, but you’re pretty much stumbling in the dark on your first playthrough.

Long story short – or no story short – you take on the role of conductor when the previous one disappears. The spirit world around you is unravelling, and your choices will shape how everything falls out.

FREERIDE: Personality test or a test of your patience?

I wanted to love FREERIDE, but I’ll just be honest upfront, I didn’t come away from this gameplay with a positive experience. I’ll talk about what bit of story I could glean and the things I liked before diving into the bad. 

You board the Fate Train that runs through the Spirit World. After boarding the train, you can talk to the people riding, but your goal is to meet the conductor. She’s a blue spirit who is nice enough, but seems squirrelly.

All she really does is give you a bit of her conductor badge that gives you telekinesis and tries to teach you how to shoot objects with it. This doesn’t work out well, but there will be more on that later. Once you’ve mastered or fumbled your way through her tutorial, she’ll send you to the back of the train for a toolbox and then runs off like a parent going to get milk for 10 years. 

All that’s left of her is her conductor badge, which you pick up, and congratulations, you’ve been promoted to conductor. The first thing you promptly do is crash. You’re so great at this. 

By this point, you’ll have learned that the Spirit World is fraying into nothingness. Who better to fix everything than the kid who doesn’t know anything?

With the previous conductor missing and everyone suspicious of you, you’ll have to navigate conversations and split paths to try and help the train riders. You’re thrust face-first into drama after drama with no idea as to what’s going on. 

You’ll want to be confident in your decisions because there’s generally no going back.

Before I start detailing the issues I had, I want to say that this game is gorgeous. I adore the art style with the moving outlines. It reminds me of cartoons that I loved growing up. And, if the controls worked better, I feel like there’s a lot of potential.

Unfortunately, this game has several bugs and a broken control function. I had the game shove me out of a room I just entered, resulting in my game breaking and severing my ability to move. My only choice was to restart from my last save. And, later, when I got out of a boss battle, the audio continued to play from it, resulting in me needing to restart from my last save to stop the sound from the battle.

As for controls, your only move is to throw things. However, to do that is incredibly frustrating and not in the least intuitive. I play on an Xbox controller, which this game says has full support. It doesn’t. I wasn’t able to pull back to force a throw. All I could do was pick up an object and make the trajectory higher, but it didn’t throw. I had to literally get close to things and try to aim objects where they needed to go because all I could do was pick up and drop.

When I went to use my mouse, I finally managed to throw, but it’s almost worse. In order to throw, you have to click the mouse and pull back to charge. This means that you have to choose exactly where the object is going. This is great for precision on non-moving targets, but in boss battles, you can’t hit them. 

No matter what I did, I never landed a single blow

The controls are clunky, and I wish an auto-aimer had been implemented because then this control type would have been forgivable.

Aside from those, the feeling of not knowing what’s going on just stays with you, and you get mocked by The Seer for not knowing things. After each act, the Seer will check in with you to note down the things that you did. You could likely see this as a hint, but since you have to wait for the next playthrough, it’s more just icing on the cake for things that don’t sit well.

I wish I’d had a better experience. I went to the Steam reviews to see if anyone had the same experience, and all the reviews are currently positive. I had to dig into the discussions to find that people were having a hard time with throwing. So, let this be a reminder to check discussion threads where you can.

None of those reviews mentioned issues with the controls, so either they have better hand-eye coordination or this is an isolated experience for a variety of unknown reasons. Either way, try out the demo before you decide to dive in. If you’re able to shoot with ease, then by all means, grab the game. If not, don’t bother because you will just be frustrated.

If you want to give FREERIDE a try, you can get it over on Steam for $19.99. Otherwise, click over to one of our other reviews, Tiny Garden. It blends the classic farming game with a Polly Pocket-inspired compact.