Metrico turns data into terrain. The PlayStation Vita puzzle-platformer from Dutch studio Digital Dreams asks you to move a small figure through levels built out of charts, and to change those charts by moving. It is a strange, clean idea, and it mostly works.
The game launched in North America on 5 August 2014 and in Europe on 6 August 2014. Digital Dreams developed and published it. Metrico was initially free for PlayStation Plus members. A re-release with added content, Metrico+, came to Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 23 August 2016.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
Infographics as Ground
Metrico is built on a single premise: infographics are not decoration here, they are the floor. Digital Dreams has said the idea was born a few years before release, out of admiration for the beauty of infographics as an art form. The studio has also said that infographics have become increasingly important in contemporary pop-culture, and that while they have not made their way to video games yet, games are a place where they can work exceptionally well.
The studio’s reasoning is worth repeating. It is not just the pretty aesthetics. Games are about interaction with data visualization. That is the whole thesis of Metrico, and it is a better thesis than most puzzle games arrive with.
A Side View of Bars and Lines
Metrico is a 3D-platform game played from a side view, in a single-player mode. Levels often have simple colour-schemes. Typically, level backgrounds are a solid colour. The midground may include visuals such as mountains, which are usually simple-toned prisms. Platforms are mostly simple-toned geometric shapes, such as cubes and 3D-rectangles.
That restraint is the point. When every surface is a solid colour and every platform is a cube or a rectangle, the only thing left to read is the data. A bar chart is not a picture of a bar chart in Metrico. It is a set of steps. A line graph is a path. A pie slice is a ledge.
The genre labels — platform, puzzle, action — all apply, but they undersell how much of the game is about reading. You look at a shape, work out what it is measuring, and then work out how your movement changes the measurement.
The Music of Palmbomen
The score is by Dutch electronic music producer Palmbomen. That credit matters more than a typical soundtrack line. Metrico’s levels are quiet, geometric and almost clinical, and the music is what keeps them from feeling like a spreadsheet. Electronic production suits a game about data. It gives the numbers a pulse.
The project was supported by the Dutch Game Garden, a studio incubation program. That detail is easy to skip past, but it explains a lot about how Metrico exists at all. A small Dutch team built a game about infographics for a handheld, with institutional support behind it, and got it onto PlayStation Plus at launch. That is not a normal path.
What the Charts Ask of You
The interaction is the whole game. Metrico centers on infographics, and the studio’s own description calls it an atmospheric puzzle action game with a mindset of its own. The mindset is that data visualization is not a subject to be explained to the player. It is the material the player manipulates.
This is where Metrico is at its best and where it can also stall. When a level’s chart logic clicks, the solution feels inevitable, and the game briefly makes a case that reading a graph and solving a puzzle are the same skill. When it does not click, you are left staring at a bar that will not move the way you want, in a room with one colour and no text.
The game rarely explains itself. That is a choice, and it is mostly the right one for a puzzle game. It is also the reason Metrico will lose some players in its first hour and keep others for its whole run.
The Vita Problem
Metrico was made for the PlayStation Vita, and it shows in ways both good and bad. The handheld’s screen suits the game’s flat colour schemes and clean geometry. Solid backgrounds and simple prisms read well at that size.
But the Vita was already a difficult place to build a game by 2014. Metrico launched free for PlayStation Plus subscribers, which put it in front of a lot of people and also made it easy to treat as a curiosity rather than a purchase. A game this specific needed an audience willing to sit with it. A subscription giveaway does not always produce that audience.
The 2016 re-release is the more interesting fact. Metrico+ brought the game and additional content to Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 23 August 2016. Two years after the Vita original, Digital Dreams took the same idea to platforms with larger audiences. That is a second chance most small puzzle games never get, and it suggests the studio believed the concept had more room than the Vita allowed.
Where the Idea Holds
Metrico is not a game that hides its concept. It announces it in the first minutes and then spends its whole length working the same seam. The risk is repetition, and Metrico does not entirely avoid it. Levels vary in shape and colour, but the underlying transaction — read the chart, move, watch the chart change — stays fixed.
What saves it is the restraint of the art. Solid backgrounds, simple-toned prisms for mountains, cubes and 3D-rectangles for platforms. There is nothing in the frame that is not either data or a surface for data. A game with this rule could easily look cheap. Metrico looks deliberate.
The action label is the one that fits least well. There is tension in a Metrico level, and timing matters, but the game is not asking for reflexes first. It is asking you to understand a diagram. Calling that action is generous.
The Score It Earns
Metrico earns a 7.0 out of 10. The concept is genuinely new, the art direction serves it, and the Palmbomen score gives the whole thing a pulse that flat geometry would not have on its own. Digital Dreams built something that had not quite been built before, and the studio’s stated reason for building it — that games are about interaction with data visualization — holds up in play.
The problems are structural. Metrico is a one-idea game, and it does not always find enough variation inside that idea to sustain a full run. Its silence, which is a virtue when a puzzle clicks, becomes a wall when one does not. And the Vita launch, free on PlayStation Plus, framed a precise little game as a freebie.
The 2016 re-release is the part worth watching in hindsight. Metrico+ took the concept to Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with additional content, which is the correct move for a game whose only real limitation was the size of its first audience. Metrico did not need to be bigger. It needed more people willing to sit with a bar chart until it moved.
The Numbers
- Title: Metrico
- Developer and publisher: Digital Dreams V.O.F.
- Release: 5 August 2014 (North America), 6 August 2014 (Europe)
- Platform: PlayStation Vita
- Launch offer: free for PlayStation Plus members
- Genres: platform, puzzle; theme: action
- Mode: single player; perspective: side view
- Music: Palmbomen
- Support: Dutch Game Garden studio incubation program
- Re-release: Metrico+, 23 August 2016, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
- Critic aggregate: 7.0 out of 10 (IGDB, 6 outlets)
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