Defunct is a brilliant little downhill racer by Swedish developers Freshly Squeezed. It's published by SOEDESCO, and built entirely within the Personal Edition of Unity. It's a short affair, featuring tonnes of fast paced racing, as well as slower sections for more puzzle orientated gameplay. The graphical style is very similar to that of Torchlight, but the gameplay is one of the more inventive styles around. Instead of relying on acceleration and breaking, your entire movement model is based on the use of gravity, and supplemented by the occasional boost pickups. The entire world is enormous in scope, and vast in potential exploration content. There are no voice actors though, just the idiosyncrasies of a rusty robot with a broken engine, and an altogether wonderfully emotive sound track. Defunct is designed as an experience, as well as a game.
In Defunct you play as a nameless robot who accidentally falls out of a cargo ship onto a human-less planet Earth.
Defunct offers an incredibly fast-paced adventuring experience, but it's brought down by its short length and shoddy performance on Switch.
Released at the end of 2017 on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Defunct has now been ported across to Nintendo Switch. The question is did we need it? At a glance Defunct looks like a run of the mill runner style game, however, in essence, this game is closer to Sonic Adventure although don’t read too much into that. The point of the game is to make it from point A to point B by finding the path with the least form of resistance.
