Mainframes was provided by Assoupi for review. Thank you!
Amongst my many flaws, I am not the best at platformers. My experience with platformer games usually consists of me drinking copious amounts of tea while swearing in a passive-aggressive manner, falling to my death for the 50th consecutive time. Asking me to play platformer games is like asking me to be a kind and honorable knight in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 or run a kind prison camp in Rimworld where captives do not have to fight each other for food. Yet, here I am, reviewing MainFrames, and I had a blast.
The narrative is relatively light in MainFrames, revolving around our protagonists quest to learn how his computer world functions. Despite this, there is an impressive amount of world-building and lore, and it's much better than I expected. Floppy, our Floppy Disk protagonist, is as creative a name of a floppy disk as it gets. Still, I enjoy all the cute animations in this digital world. There are talkative daemons who maintain the balance, although I found the finer details a little nonsensical. I love the aesthetic, with its bootup screen reminding me of an old 90s computer, and even the setting screens look cool.
MainFrames is not particularly long, and moderately skilled players can expect to complete it in a few hours. However, it does pack a lot into its small package, with optional secrets everywhere. The difficulty borrows some mechanics from that incredibly popular indie darling Celeste, with instant death upon failure and an instant respawn.
This does wonders for pacing. I have always preferred this method because you can jump back into the gameplay without wasting time after a slip-up. With how many times I mistimed a jump and died with my poor floppy disk avatar disintegrating, I was grateful I could respawn instantly! Some of these platform jumps get pretty challenging, but that might be a skill issue for me.
The mechanics and controls in MainFrames are fluid and tight, and you can jump around most of the map with some precision. The main gimmick is dragging folder boxes around with the cursor around the small maps, allowing you to move around platforms more easily. Moving around in the game was a delight, and I enjoyed myself even when I failed.
Levels get gradually more complex with additional enemies, platform quirks, and death traps, which helps expand the game's scope. Despite the tiny rooms, a lot is going on with them. I was initially concerned that the trim level sizes would be a downside, but the result is the opposite. From a design aspect, it is impressive how well developer Assoupi created these levels.
There is also a lot of open exploration in a metroid-vania style. However, I wish MainFrames had provided an accessible map, so I knew where I was going. I had a couple of issues working out where I was supposed to go, and it was easy to get lost. Some pretty damn hard mechanics left me stumped, like the rooms that require you to expand a rapidly narrowing block to grab a key. If you mess up a single jump for a fraction of a second, you’ll die and have to start the room over.
While it lacks any graphical settings apart from adjusting screen resolution, MainFrames is a delightful experience on the Steam Deck. Right out of the box, the game works excellently with standard settings on the OLED Steam Deck (I mean 1280x800 resolution, unlocked TDP, and 90hz refresh rate).
Even at an unlocked TDP, MainFrames do not require that much juice, pulling an average of 9 watts of power draw. This translates to 5 and a half hours of battery life on the OLED Steam Deck, which is solid enough. However, we can do better.
I have only owned an OLED Steam Deck for a week, so all my experiences are with the 60hz refresh rate of the LCD model. To my surprise, MainFrames does not need much power for solid performance. Our only in-game tools for managing performance are limiting the frame rate and screen resolution. With a 60 FPS/Hz lock and a TDP limit of 4, I found the best spot between performance and battery life while maintaining the advantages of the OLED screen. With these settings, I averaged a power draw of less than 7 watts, giving us over 7 hours of battery life.
MainFrames is playable in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Portuguese Brazil, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. With no voice acting required, all the critical information should be in these translations, including achievements.
Accessibility options in MainFrames is a mixed bag. You can adjust the screen resolution and change the screen (borderless window, exclusive fullscreen, or windowed) and the volume, but that’s all you can do in the settings.
There are no colorblind options font size options, or any X and Y axes inverting. The difficulty settings I highlighted offer some nice options, and you can change keybinds. All text is eligible on the Steam Deck, though I wish they chose a different font in the menus. I would have liked some interface scaling.
Players can also toggle cool things like invincibility, infinite jump, and infinite twists if necessary. However, it is recommended to play things as vanilla as possible
With its retro graphics, excellent movement, and great level design, MainFrames is a delightful platformer even for newcomers to the genre. Playing great on the Steam Deck is the icing on the cake. It isn't perfect of course. The lack of direction on where to go next makes it a hard game to navigate, and it made the story hard for me to understand.
Overall, MainFrames is a tight little package that accomplishes all it sets out to do.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Mainframes is a fast paced platformer set inside a PC mainframe with excellent level design. Its accessibility options make it a good choice for newcomers and veterans alike, and it is near perfect on the Steam Deck!
