A stranger wakes up injured in an unfamiliar and quickly crumbling facility where strange experiments in materials science are taking place. Guided by the artificial intelligence in their AR glasses and the voice of a scientist who is also trying to escape, they must complete a series of increasingly difficult “physics” puzzles with a matter-printing gun they found before it’s too late.
This is the conceit and general gameplay loop of The Bradwell Conspiracy, a first-person puzzle-adventure game that sits very much within the tradition of the Portal franchise. It was made by A Brave Plan and published by Bossa Studios, the creators of Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread. The game boasts a formidable pedigree, with designers and programmers from Fable, Batman, and the Tomb Raider franchise, performances by Rebecca LaChance and Abubakar Salim (who previously worked on Assassin’s Creed: Origins), music by Austin Wintory (Journey, The Pathless), and performance direction and dialogue consultation from Kate Saxon (Alien: Isolation) and Jane Espenson (Battlestar Galactica), respectively.
You might expect that with all of this video game and broader entertainment industry star power, so to speak, we might be reckoning with a flashier, more ambitious production. The website for the game absolutely, 100-percent gives off a certain John Hammond “We spared no expense” je nais se quois, and when you’ve got certified “We built a wild animal park for dinosaurs” vibes your shit’s either going to be massively underwhelming or you’re going to be met with surefire disaster.
What I can thankfully say is that The Bradwell Conspiracy is by no means a surefire disaster. On my iPad through Apple Arcade, the game plays exactly like a mid-tier first-person puzzler should in fact play: smooth controls, very few, if any, bugs to speak of, a fairly memorable aesthetic (as advertised), great vocal performances and a story that is about as enjoyable as any paperback thriller you might buy in an airport before a long flight (not that anyone’s doing those… right?). If you are looking for an enjoyable way to pass four to six hours, The Bradwell Conspiracy is for you.
With a caveat. (Spoilers for the last level of the game ahead.)
In The Bradwell Conspiracy, your primary method of interacting with the world is via a portable 3D printer that works with an instantly-programmable matter source called – get this – Bradwellium. Wild, I know. Bradwellium molds into specific shapes based on blueprints you collect throughout the game. Each blueprint takes exactly one brick of Bradwellium to print and when a puzzle is solved, it’s solved forever – any extra Bradwellium can be reclaimed before moving on. Also, any Bradwellium you place anywhere becomes essentially welded to the spot you placed it, only moving when you reclaim it with your 3D printer gun.
If you’re thinking this sounds like a pretty cool conceit, if a little rough, I’d agree with you! There’s a moment where you’re in a room filled with water, and to get the water to drain you have to essentially re-fit the plumbing on the walls with a single section of pipe you copied, manipulated into different positions from top to bottom. It was a cool little puzzle. Most of the puzzles don’t rise to this level of complexity, though. Mostly, you’re making bridges to cross moderately large gaps, or using the camera on your AR glasses to take a picture so your scientist friend can flip a switch somewhere that unblocks your path.
The thing that makes games like Portal memorable is an appreciable sense of progression. You start out with little knowledge of how to traverse the landscape; the game teaches you. As you move forward, it builds on the very simple mechanics it showed you at the beginning until you’re – sigh – truly “thinking with portals,” as it were. You are built up into a specific framework of working through the puzzle in front of you with the tools that you are given, and without much prompting you should be able to tease out the solution to harder puzzles that you likely would not have been able to solve at the beginning of your play session.
Without much warning, The Bradwell Conspiracy’s final puzzle veers hard left in a way I basically had no idea how to reckon with, and rather than feeling satisfied when I eventually finished, I was mostly just confused and tired.
Without too much in the way of foreshadowing, the final puzzle in The Bradwell Conspiracy involves placing mirrors at various points in a particular pattern to shoot a laser at hydrogen fuel cells in order to blow them up and close a portal to what I can only presume is another world. It’s only really ever referred to as “the source of Bradwellium,” so that’s super helpful. Anyway, you have to place the mirrors pretty precisely in order to get the laser up and down hills, and I spent probably an hour and a third of my iPad’s battery life just fuckin fidgeting with their position. My stress wasn’t appreciably reduced by my scientist buddy constantly reminding me that the clock was ticking.
It’s just not a very good section and shows up rather abruptly. I also thought it felt a little bit too much like a simplified (lmao) version of the last half of Half-Life 2: Episode 1. It just up and introduced new story elements that definitely piqued my interest but basically were guaranteed to go nowhere (unless there’s a sequel planned), and the very end of the game, which depicts us laying semi-unconscious in an elevator with our scientist friend, ascending from the depths in what feels extremely like an homage to Portal’s retconned ending, just kind of felt abrupt for me. It didn’t “stick the landing,” I guess you could say.
Still, despite my frustrations, I am glad this game exists. Not every game needs to be a stone cold masterpiece, to change the form forever. Not every game needs to have photorealistic graphics with ray-tracing and advanced bitmapping or whatever – sometimes it can look like a unity-ass unity game that runs well and doesn’t randomly glitch you into the fucking subocean. Sometimes the story can be hit-or-miss, and that’s fine. Not every game needs to change the world.
By all accounts, it took A Brave Plan a few years to make this game. They likely poured a lot of money into it (I mean fuck, just judging from the page on their website, they had to have done so) and might be disappointed with the response it’s garnered. And that’s totally fair. It’s no The Last Of Us Part II or Tell Me Why. It’s not The Pathless or even Portal 2. But you know what else The Bradwell Conspiracy isn’t? It’s not Cyberpunk 2077. It’s not Jurassic Park, crumbling apart after the dinosaurs escaped containment. It is an exemplar of “shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less,” and that alone makes this game notable. If you have a chance, pick this game up. It’s available on Apple Arcade, PC, Xbox and PlayStation consoles.