Apple Arcade review #112: The Bradwell Conspiracy

I’d been looking forward to playing this one, since the trailers were intriguing. Having played it for the better part of an hour on the iPhone, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that first-person games are not particularly well suited to a small screen with touch controls.

The interface is not great. Movement works fine, but I immediately had to increase the sensitivity of the camera to the maximum setting. Unfortunately, the non-adjustable dampening makes looking around incredibly frustrating and motion-sickness-inducing, and trying to precisely position the reticule on an object is an abject lesson in patience. You constantly overshoot the target, and on more than one occasion I wanted to throw my non-existent controller at the wall.

The game looks pretty good, but there’s a lot of visual detail in the scenes, including numerous posters and computer screens, which does not come across well on the small screen. To read the tiny text you have to adjust your position, and the camera, carefully…and that’s not always an easy task.

Flawed controls and graphics aside, I found the item replication game mechanic to be difficult to get to grips with, and the associated puzzles were a chore. The photography feature — where you take snapshots of items and locations to send to your unseen partner for feedback — was hit and miss: I never knew exactly what the game wanted me to take pictures of, or what would receive a response. I did want to learn more about the world and the story, but the finicky puzzle-solving got in the way of that.

I might still continue playing, since I want to understand more of what’s going on, but not on the phone, and not with touch controls.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/no/app/the-bradwell-conspiracy/id1458000142