Sure, some services may come and go and others have yet to be birthed but the gravity of the market is pulling towards bringing more AAAA style games to new devices that may not be able to natively run the applications.įor the past three weeks or so, I have been using Backbone, a new device that is looking to turn your mobile phone into a handheld console. Services like Stadia, Luna, and Xbox Cloud Gaming are here and there is no going back. I personally found the narrative drive the most interesting part of Backbone, so wasn’t concerned by the gameplay itself the story alone pulled me through the five hours or so needed to complete.There is little doubt that we are sitting in the accretion disc of the black hole that is game streaming. What this does mean though is that if you are a fan of the gameplay mechanics of a normal point and click affair, then you might find the lack of options here to be a bit disappointing. These are complemented by the use of a crouch button and this means there is some stealth to be had in certain sections. There are little puzzles to solve in Backbone too, but none are as complex as you might normally find. And whilst the dialogue trees offer many different choices, they do often lead to the same outcome. Instead, most of the adventure is spent chatting to people, following leads in regards where to go next. You collect items around the levels, but it’s quite light in terms of inventory management there isn’t ever the need for any complex combining and you certainly don’t need to gather items all the time to progress the story.

The gameplay works like an old-fashioned point and clicker but is much simpler than a normal game of this type.

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