Ugly | Xbox Review

Ugly is a dark, 2D side-scrolling platform-puzzle game where you play as an unseemly little man with a magical shard from a broken mirror. You make your way through rooms in a large, ruined castle to uncover fractions of your past and discover what happened to your idyllic life.

I Hope You’re an Olympic Finger-Gymnast…

To traverse the castle and solve the puzzles you require the aid of your magic mirror shard. When placed, the mirror projects a reflection of you that replicates your position and actions on the opposite side of the shard from you. At the press of a button you can swap places with your reflection, and your physical self appears where your reflection was, and vice versa . Using this ability, you can have your reflection walk through walls into other rooms in order to appear there yourself. 

Getting the hang of moving in this game was a little tricky, and very slow at first. It takes some mental gymnastics to understand and execute the necessary button combinations with any kind of fluidity. When you need to go through a wall, the process would be to run up to the wall, place your shard, run backwards away from the wall so your reflection passes through it, switch places, retrieve the shard and then continue running forward. The process is aided by the fact that the shard comes flying back to you on command instead of having to go pick it up, but even then, when you need to go through several walls in quick succession, your fingers will get a workout. 

Not only can you send out your reflection across a vertical plane, but you also have the ability to place the shard on the floor to project an upside down reflection beneath yourself. The mental gymnastics continue! Using this ability you can pass through floors and travel upwards by placing the shard on the floor, falling a great distance below it to swap places with your reflection . Other than an ability to ‘reset’ each puzzle room, these two shard placements are the only mechanics in the game, and with them you can achieve more than you probably expect. 

In each room the goal is to retrieve a key that you will use to unlock another puzzle room in the castle. In many of the areas there are also memories that you collect for story-telling purposes. If at any point after you retrieve the key you get stuck and need to reset the puzzle room (by pulling out a flask and drinking ’til you pass out), you will lose the key and have to start the puzzle from the beginning. 

Discovering what you can do with your shard power is fun and wonderful, and the game does a great job of encouraging you to use the two abilities to solve the puzzles without any perceptible amount of hand-holding. Trial and error are your best teachers, which sounds frustrating, I know, but I was never stumped for too long on any, save two, of the puzzles. The difficulty level of the puzzles made them highly satisfying to complete. 

After completing all the doors in a single wing of the castle there is a boss fight! I was a little caught off guard, because how am I supposed to fight this giant thing by mirror shifting around the map? The techniques became apparent, and the final boss was enjoyably challenging. 

…And I Hope You Like Scared Children!

The story in Ugly is dark and sad. It’s presented in a beautiful artistic style. The memories you unlock are not in order, but several of them touch on adult themes: abuse, neglect, sex, alcohol abuse, etc. It’s presented in a childish crayon drawing style. Upon finishing the game I was excited to go into my collection and look at the memories in order (they are numbered after all), but looking at them again I couldn’t puzzle together exactly what the story was. If I’m right about my interpretation then there are a few surprises I was absolutely not expecting and they make for a great story. It’s hard to tell if I’m correct since each memory is shown in a single crayon drawing without any words to explain except for what the ‘Achievements’ menu labels the memory as. 

In addition to the memory drawings there are also several ‘movies’ that show you a projector-style black and white clip consisting of 4-10 seconds of footage. As far as I can tell the footage relates very little, if at all, to the story. Again, this may just be a lack of imagination in my own interpretation of the character’s background. 

Replayability

Ugly was a lot of fun, but the story is so sad and dark. I don’t have a lot of desire to go back and play it again, and as far as I know there are no alternate endings. But there are a few puzzles that get a bonus puzzle section after you beat the game. These bonus sections have difficult puzzles and items that you can collect. I’ve done a few myself, but overall the items aren’t enough to get me to want to 100% the game. There is no multiplayer aspect. If I were to play the game again, I think it would be to demonstrate to someone else the cool mechanics and puzzles.

Summary

Overall, Ugly is a fun, satisfying game that I’m glad I got to experience. I would love for someone to confirm what I think happened in the story, or to tell me exactly what the message was if I’m wrong. The game is available on Switch, PC and I enjoyed it on Xbox. With the price point of twenty bucks across the board I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a darker tale and has the kind of patience for advanced platforming and puzzle solving. 

To hear me talk more about Ugly, be sure to listen to the October 25, 2023 episode of The Gaming Outsider podcast around the 1:31:49 time stamp.

This review is based on an Xbox copy of Ugly provided by Sandbox Strategies for coverage purposes. It is also available on Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.