I don’t know how the folks at Voxel Studios pitched The Bench.
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that room. The Bench is like sinister frisbee golf, but you’re chucking pigeons. If that doesn’t grab your attention, let me also tell you that it centres on the story of an elderly man who escapes a nursing home and his struggles with casual ageism tossed his way like breadcrumbs at ducks. Still not there? Might I also share that there is a deep state surveillance conspiracy underneath the seemingly charming, bright-coloured city you navigate, where the Parks and Recreation budget for benches must rival that of a small European nation’s total GDP?
What else can I say to introduce The Bench? It’s nothing less than bonkers, and that makes it one of the most creative games I’ve played this year. But that creativity needs some refining.
The game opens with a benign scene: in a first-person perspective, you are seated on a bench on the porch of a nursing home. A woman opens the entrance door to find you and, with a touch of condescension, reminds you to come inside and to take your pills before leaving. As you regain your composure and look forward, an oddly coloured pigeon circles out in front of you, then speaks, addressing you. And away we go.
We’re whisked into a dimly lit, amorphous dreamscape. The pigeon transforms into a dark figure with a large black trench coat and matching fedora. The sudden noir tone hits you out of left field. Reject your pills; reclaim who you were, who you always have been.
The next area serves its function as a tutorial, and it is well needed. The Bench plays unlike most contemporary games and feels more like a virtual shooting gallery. You aren’t walking through areas but rather seated throughout the entire game. Positioned from a bench, you aim at interactable objects with your selected pigeon, held in a dark comedic fashion by the throat in your left hand. You huck them at things, usually puzzle pieces to unlock a way forward, but sometimes at other people just to ruin their day.
Once you’ve hit everything you can from your vantage point, it’s a game of leapfrog to go from bench to bench to advance the game. Angles and perspective are critical in order to progress. You’ll teleport forward with the help of your pigeon lackeys. Areas are designed like hedge mazes (sometimes literally) where you’ll have to explore multiple paths to recruit more pigeons to your squad.
To add more birds to your crew, you scour each level for golden eggs that you unceremoniously slam to the ground to hatch another minion. These eggs are typically locked behind short mini-games, and their obscurity and skill are uneven across the game. Thankfully, you don’t have to find and hatch all eggs in a given level, as there are more eggs than required to move forward. There’s a kiosk in each area that will allow fast travel to any unlocked location if you find yourself stuck, like I did in the third level.
Oh boy, I did not enjoy the third level.
It’s a classic sewer level, where you navigate tunnels to find more eggs to open a door to the penultimate area of the game. You need 30 pigeons. I entered the area in the low 20s and began in earnest to hunt some eggs. To give credit where it’s due, the level design here utilises verticality well, and I spent lots of time zipping between the benches in the tunnels and those up in the rafters. The signposting was excellent for where you need to go but not so much on what to do.
There’s awkward mechanical pacing. Pigeons will be able to acquire tools such as bricks, batteries, and scissors to remove obstacles on your path forward, but there’s no real order in which these are given or explained. In the third area, I found myself stuck at 29 pigeons for far too long because I assumed a new tool would be given to me in this area, based on some doors I found that required one. As I realised later, this tool is actually not available at all in this area. In the first level, a brick was given to me, and I used it to get past the majority of obstacles. In the second section, scissors and I used them the same way, forming a gameplay pattern in my mind. The sequence breaks in the sewers, and it doesn’t really pick back up for the rest of the game.
It’s a shake-up in gameplay, which usually goes over well, but this time around the shift in gears wasn’t dramatic enough to signpost what was happening, and I felt I was idling. When in my frustration I decided to just go back to a previous area via a kiosk, it was closed. There’s an in-game day/night cycle, and the fast travel point, which also serves as a place to cash in marbles for cosmetic items, is only open from 06:00 to 22:00. Of course, I arrived at 23:00. So I puttered around the sewers again in my rowboat, surrounded by my faithful crew of 29 pigeons, and waited out the time.
There are other ways to pass time, notably a mini-game where you fill in the dots in specific colour patterns and sequences. I personally didn’t enjoy it, and unfortunately that same puzzle becomes required to advance certain chokepoints in the critical path to the end of the game.
The Bench felt overloaded with mini-games. When they chain together seamlessly and progress is made, they’re a joy, but there’s a fine line between that and stepping on every rake in a Looney Tunes reel. It is frontloaded with silly dialogue over the top of a sea of commentary on ageism, with an espionage backstory serving as an allegory on hidden and unknown identities. It’s thematically rich, even if at times it contradicts its own goals by making old age the butt end of a joke. It’s a fantastic combination of an under-represented topic paired with a forgotten shooting gallery design.
However, things lose steam once you hit the final stretch towards the finale. Maybe there’s just too much crammed in here, or too much expectation to keep accelerating without easing off the gas. The momentum becomes mired in a story that is not just off the rails but has left the trainyard completely. The ending did not land with grace. It’s muddy, lacking any clarity on what exactly The Bench would have you take away your time with it. However, if you’re looking for peak absurdism, you’ll find it with the many whiplash twists that close The Bench.
There’s plenty more in here to ruffle your feathers. Throwing your pigeons and getting them to accomplish an intended task is not as simple as it should be. Much of this is forgivable, since it may only take you two or three tries to land a throw, and resetting an attempt is quick and painless. But there are sections where you’ll have to string over a dozen pigeons in a row, and it took much, much longer than it should have to do it. As willing as the pigeons are to do whatever you ask, they’ll fail more often than they’ll succeed, and it’s hard not to get annoyed at their inconsistencies.
As I watched the credits roll, a fair amount of the game’s charm had worn off, but even hours after completion, the good certainly outweighs the bad. The bench-to-bench gameplay and pigeon throwing were rock-solid foundational mechanics to build a game on.
There’s no scenario in which I will forget The Bench. As much as I struggled with some of its design and jank, it is still a shining example of the fresh ideas that video games can produce, particularly in the indie space.
