This was another free game on Epic that I thought looked pretty and might not take very long to play. It turns out that while you can technically complete the game very quickly if that’s all you want to do, there is plenty of content in it if you want to take your time. Also, while there is no combat and no way of losing, this isn’t a zero-friction game either. There are puzzles and hidden secrets which might take some effort to work out. I don’t really like it all that much but it’s not bad.

The idea here is that you are a young girl, embarking on the rite of adulthood of your nomadic tribe. You set out on your own on your hoverbike to explore the world of Midden and discover your vocation. This rite is called the Gliding as you’re given a stone that grants you the power to glide through the end. This means you never need to fear falling from even very great heights. The people you meet on your journey will give you quests and sometimes this will earn you badges. Your ultimate objective is collect enough badges in a given vocation to complete a mask. Of course, there are plenty of other things to do including discovering some of the secrets of the world, collecting clothing pieces or parts with which to upgrade your bike or even just admiring the scenery of the different regions and the locations of interest in each.

The game uses simple cel shaded art that makes its whole world look like a cartoon. It does look rather good and as you can see in the screenshots, it works well to convey the sense of Midden being a wide open world with plenty of scenic vistas. Each region has its own distinctive features, including rock pillars, huge skeletons, crashed spaceships, ancient ruins and so on. There’s lots to see and the game rewards your curiosity in all kinds of little ways. That said, there’s not a lot of fine detail in the art, which is a problem when you’re right up close against landscape features. When you’re in a tunnel for example, it can be hard to tell the difference between a wall in the background and one closer to you. The game cheats a little as well by having every character wear masks so the art team doesn’t have to draw faces. It’s explained away in-universe as a cultural affectation and it is a rather neat part of the worldbuilding.

Since you can’t die and you can roam anywhere you want, the main obstacle in this game is height. The ability to glide isn’t flight as you lose height for each meter of horizontal distance you travel. You gain height by climbing. Sable can climb pretty much any surface, the exception being the metallic hull of spaceships. However this drains stamina and you simply fall when you run out of stamina, limiting how high you can climb without reaching a solid surface to stand on. A questline lets you upgrade your stamina by searching for collectibles throughout the world. This will end up being one of your primary activities the whole game as every location of interest will have one or more of the said collectible hidden somewhere nearby. Upgrading your stamina is absolutely crucial as some locations are not accessible without enough stamina, making some quests impossible to complete. There are no hints on your map where they are. You just have to keep your eyes peeled and get into the habit of scanning your surroundings for them.

The same emphasis on paying attention to the world itself applies to quests as well. You do get a quest marker telling you where the quest takes place is but all it does is point you to the general location. Once there, you need to find the objects or person of interest on your own. This isn’t easy if the location in question is a large town! In some places, you also need to solve some puzzles. They’re not too difficult if you’re an experienced gamer but it’s also not a game with zero friction at all as you might have been led to expect. Overall exploring the world of Midden is pleasant enough and the worldbuilding is neat. However it’s also not anything that blows me away. For example, you might think that with a hoverbike, they would implement something like a real race event. Instead, they have a questline that involves only four checkpoints each time and isn’t a race at all. The feeling of riding a hoverbike isn’t good at all as it frequently runs into the terrain when it should feel smooth and enjoyable.

What’s worse is that there are persistent, annoying bugs. The game sometimes loses track of your character while you’re riding the bike, so there’s a visual glitch of your bike zooming around without anyone riding it. Sometimes the label that tells you an object can be interacted with fails to pop up, so you need to back away and approach the object again. During some puzzles, the switches fail after you activate them a few times and you need to reload the game to reset the room. It’s nothing gamebreaking, but they’re still rather annoying especially when this is a game with modest requirements and shouldn’t be doing anything very complex. Due to these problems, I’d rate this game as being only okay. There are quite a few things about the world of Midden that I liked but none of it is truly outstanding and there are just too many annoying niggles.