Backfirewall_

I went into Backfirewall_ expecting a novelty tech joke and came out genuinely moved by a rubber-duck hint system and an operating system with abandonment issues. That says a lot about what this small Swiss studio pulled off. The setup is deceptively simple: you are the Update Assistant, dropped into a smartphone to push through an OS upgrade. OS9, the current system and your self-appointed boss, points out immediately that the update will erase you both. So the two of you go rogue, tearing through the phone's internal geography to stop the inevitable. The world inside that phone is the real draw. You walk through the Bin's junkyard, Battery's acid-green lab, and GPU's art galleries, meeting anthropomorphized apps and processes that manage to feel like actual characters rather than one-note tech puns. OS9 himself rides the line between charming and morally suspect in exactly the way a good companion character should, calling to mind Wheatley from Portal 2 in spirit if not in design. The broader cast includes social media apps that get lost, banking apps with security holes, and a meta-story about the phone's human owner that only unlocks in full once you've earned it. That last layer, told through collectible text messages scattered across levels, adds real weight to what could have been a one-joke premise. The themes underneath all the comedy, planned obsolescence, the fear of being replaced, what it means to preserve something past its usefulness, are handled with more care than the premise has any right to demand. Gameplay sits at the intersection of first-person puzzle adventure and light exploration, with a dash of stealth that the game could honestly have trimmed. The puzzle logic is clever: a large terminal in each zone displays statements that are currently "true" for that area, and your job is to disprove them using OS9's cheat codes. You delete junk to drop a box count below a threshold, invert objects from floor to ceiling, rearrange binary trees, change the color of a lock to bypass it. None of it will tax seasoned puzzle players, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a design oversight. A rubber duck stationed in every zone offers hints ranging from gentle nudges to full walkthroughs, keeping the experience accessible without forcing it on anyone. Where the game stumbles is in its stealth corridors, dark and repetitive stretches that feel bolted on, and a handful of puzzle rooms that recycle the same mechanic once or twice too many. A few minor glitches and cursor fussiness have been reported across reviews as well. For anyone drawn here by comparisons to Portal or The Stanley Parable, the honest word is: spiritually adjacent, mechanically lighter. This is closer to an interactive short film with escape-room interludes than a puzzle game with narrative dressing. The audio design earns its own mention, with tracks that pair well with the saturated, colorful environments and voice work for OS9 that sells every dry aside. The whole run clocks in around four to five hours, and it knows when to end, which in this genre is a genuine virtue. Multiple endings and hidden collectibles tied to character outcomes give completionists a reason to replay, though the story's emotional beats hit harder on a first, unspoiled run.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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