I'm always fascinated by how much deep the human imagination can go when confronted by the unknown. For example, the Tron universe was always SO COOL to me. I was 12 when Tron: Legacy came out, and I didn't care much for the plot, and years later I tried to watch the original Tron and I slept through half of it. All that said, this cyberworld of neon discs and motorcycles, with heroes made of software and villains being literally the "Master Control Program" is incredible. I was always a kid that loved technology and related things, so it was specially cool to see that world.

If even today people think that computers are magical machines, in the 80s, of course they would create a whole society around half a dozen of tech terms and words. Today, as a person that studied computer science for almost a decade, I look into it more as a sci-fi scenario that happens to be in a "virtual world". Nevertheless, Tron is cool and I need to play more of its games in the future.

But for now, I want to talk about Backfirewall_, a short adventure made by the Swiss team Naraven Games, and published by All in! Games (that also published Ghostrunner and Tools Up!). You can see the premise and think that it's just too derivative from Tron: a story inside a smartphone, where all the apps are living creatures and the system is a society by itself. But instead of a sci-fi neon odyssey, it goes more to the idea of a tragicomic digital plot, where there's no good or bad, and apps just want to save their own life from deletion.

In this story, you are the Update Assistant, a new app that only objective in life was make possible the operating system update process. The old operation system personification, OS9, isn't really happy with the idea, because they will be completely deleted in the process... and you too, because your work would be done after all. All that happens after that is just the adventure of those two apps, traveling through the smartphone, triggering errors to reboot the system before the update finishes.

I don't think the plot by itself was amazing: some jokes don't land, and the only moment that was really emotional (and got me with surprise) didn't had a lot of repercussions. But the whole world around it is SO interesting that I just couldn't stop playing it — I actually started and finished it in the same night. Most characters are fully voiced in English, that helps a lot of putting charisma and personality to them. OS9, the soon-to-be-deleted operating system (and the player's partner during the game) is an obvious favorite, but there's a lot of other characters to be loved, like Social Media F's insecure persona or my great pal Wat, how someone can't like Wat?

The scenarios themselves were also really interesting. Yes, I'm a computer science bachelor and every well-made reference to technical things gets me every time — I still like the Geocities joke in Ralph Breaks the Internet —, but a lot of Backfirewall_'s world was made by someone who understand the bits and bytes behind a computer. How a system update is a death call for the old OS, how much they love and worship their user as a goddess, and even the small things in the dialogue! One of my favorite side stories is Social Media I's saga to get the access of the user's photos, fighting with the gallery app or appealing to annoying push notifications. There is a lot of poetic license involved, of course, but it feels more "digital" than Tron ever did.

Unfortunately, playing Backfirewall_ is way less interesting than its world building. Half of the time you are on scripted sequences appreciating the story, but soon you are invited to free-roam rooms in the phone. OS9 gives you a checklist of errors you must trigger in that part of the system, and your job is to explore and interact with the objects and characters until you got them all to progress. Those puzzles are really easy — and those that doesn't involve talking to anyone are mostly boring.

Your main way to interact with the world is through "cheat codes", that, in paper, would allow you to manipulate the system and everything around you. In reality, you just change the gravity, the color or remove objects. This idea of changing reality has a lot of potential — and, in a digital world, it's really easy to put into the lore. But here, you just click a dozen times and you can go to the next part of the game.

What surprise me the most was the shit ton of collectables you can get in Backfirewall_. A LOT, REALLY. The only ones that has something more than an achievement is some user messages (that tells the side story of what's happening with the owner of the phone) and a lot of smaller apps you can help during your journey. Everything else is just there for the sake of collecting. I love finding bits and accumulating them, but when they are really hidden, there's no hints and you cannot go back to previous areas, it just becomes frustrating.

Balancing the pros and cons, "watching" Backfirewall_ was worth it, although playing it wasn't that good. It has some forgettable puzzles, some misses in the story and a frustrating system of pointless collectables. But around that, you have one of the most interesting worlds created in the premise of "what happens inside a computer" that I have seen. You have charismatic characters, some good jokes and a more believable (and technically accurate?) concept of a digital society. It's not cooler than Tron's light cycles — there aren't a lot of things cooler than Tron's light cycles —, but the OS9's saga to survive was really fun for some hours. Maybe you also (don't) need an update too.