As someone who regularly enjoys pointing and laughing at the ever burning trash fire that is Web 3.0, I've seen many attempts at turning the blockchain into a place, either real or virtual. Not a month goes by without me revisiting Dan Olson's wild ride through Decentraland, and you can bet I savored watching Cryptoland's nonsensical IRL island implode.
However, thanks to Kotaku's reporting on the latest Web 3.0 MMO real estate scheme, we have finally found Sonic in the metaverse. And he is a bored ape.
Yes, Otherside looks like yet another bare bones, browser-based, Breath of the Wild wanna-be with bad hitching and few original ideas, but what immediately caught my attention was its transit system, which bears a striking resemblance to... well... perhaps the "FREE ROAM" video below makes it obvious.
While I (among many) am critical of Sonic Frontiers' over-reliance on grind rails, it's generally pretty effective as a system to get around the islands. The game de-prioritizes its fast travel, and having the rail system spawn as you uncover the map is a neat idea. Clearly the Otherside developers agree, since getting around its map leans on slow, Sonic-esque rail grinding challenges. You can really see the degree to which the game uses them in this... unconvincingly enthusiastic YouTuber's playthrough that the Kotaku article linked. (Explicit language)
Beyond that, there's really nothing else of note going on in Otherside. This bizarre preview just seems to let players run around the environment, take photos to fulfill some missions, have the client crash and lose all those completed missions (as occurred in the video), and maybe enter a club if you've spent an ungodly amount of money on an NFT. I look forward to seeing all the fascinating ways this project will fail to deliver on its pitch, just like every other techbro speculative metaverse vision.
Perhaps the only meaningful takeaway here is that Sonic Frontiers has gained enough cultural relevance to join the ranks of being ripped off. You can't huck a stone without hitting a game that wants to be Breath of the Wild these days, but this is the first time I've seen someone try to emulate Frontier's specific flavor of Breath of the Wild that isn't just a full-on fan game.
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