Gemini: Heroes Reborn: A puzzle platformer based on a TV show.

If there’s anything I kinda miss about the modern age of video games is that there's not enough video games based on media properties. They were so ubiquitous throughout the '80s and '90s where we had classics like Disney's DuckTales and Goldeneye. They started dying off by the early 2010s, during the start of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 eras. When I think of promotions with licensed properties these days, it’s usually as crossovers with other games, like Bingo Story and The Price Is Right, or John McClane of Die Hard fame in Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War. The most recent game I can think of is, amusingly, a game based on Space Jam: A New Legacy made by the people at Digital Eclipse.

Even though they’re not as common these days, there is still a video game based on a TV series or movie released here and there. Most of them are relegated to mobile devices, but sometimes a game or two does make it to the mainstream gaming consoles – or in my case, Steam. Gemini: Heroes Reborn is one of those rare cases.

(This game says "Hey, check me out! look at my cool superpowers!")

Developed by Phosphor Games – a studio mostly known for making mobile games and Virtual Reality titles – the game was released in early 2016 as a tie-in to the TV series Heroes Reborn, a science-fiction drama that is a sequel series to one of the biggest 2000s-era TV shows: Heroes.

(The internet's making it harder to find images these days, I swear.)

Admittedly I don’t watch a lot of television, so my knowledge of Heroes is through friends that did watch it: The premise is that a giant corporation simply called "The Company" was experimenting with human beings and giving them superpowers, of which a small group of people slowly find out that they have. Eventually they team up to stop the weekly big bads and eventually figure out the Company's ulterior motives. Basically a serial TV show that would sow the seeds for things like the later Marvel Cinematic Universe.

From what I gathered, Heroes started out great, then the Writers Guild of America had a strike midway through the second season, basically throwing the whole planned storyline out of whack in such a way that the show never recovered, eventually getting canceled after the fourth season concluded in 2010. In 2016, a sequel series called Heroes Reborn came and went for a single season, and is the basis for this game.

(I assure you that this game has pretty smooth cutscenes and not solid images that look like they were made in Photoshop.)

You play as Cassandra Hays, a woman who suffered amnesia as a teenager and is taken to an abandoned military base called "The Quarry" by her friend Alex to hopefully make sense of what happened to her. Eventually Alex gets captured by soldiers who apparently are still at the building, and Cassandra must find a way to save him. Eventually Cassandra finds out she has special powers that allow her to go through time, switching her between the then-present timeline of 2016 and the near-past of 2008, when the building was still operating. Eventually acquiring telekinesis powers in the past, she uses this and her time abilities to figure out what happened to her.

(Our antagonist, Trevor Mason. I wonder if he has a brother named Alex...)

The plot itself isn’t particularly remarkable. It falls into a lot of the common fiction tropes of characters double-crossing you and having to do bidding for the big bad – who's also unique to this game, voiced by Robin Atkin Downes of all people – while also figuring out the mystery of Cassandra’s family.

(The first instance of this game actually relating to the TV show in some way. And it won't be the last.)

Since this is based on a TV series, you’re probably wondering how much this game has to do with said TV series, and if you need to have watched the show to understand what’s going on. I honestly thought I had to do a bit of binge-watching of Heroes to figure this game out, but it seems I don’t have to: With the exception of Dahlia, a deuteragonist that Cassandra meets several times throughout the game, every other character is unique to this game and is not mentioned on the show at all. Even the fan-ran Heroes Wiki has entries for these characters, and entries on the characters, including protagonist Cassandra, are no more than a sentence long. So don’t feel like you need to watch five seasons of a TV series to get what’s going on, because I haven’t watched a single second of Heroes before writing this.

(I suddenly feel like I'm playing Half-Life with how silly these puzzles are.)

Back to Gemini: The game is a first-person puzzle platformer. Cassandra is not a firearms expert so she doesn’t shoot guns, but she gains abilities that give her opportunities to grab and throw objects with telekinesis, slow down time to dodge projectiles and move with super speed, and to switch between time periods. In a sense, she’s like if Gordon Freeman from Half-Life 2 onwards and Faith from Mirror’s Edge had a baby.

(I’d like to think even by 2008 they would stop using old IBM PCs for research...)

A fair share of Gemini involves Cassandra throwing chairs and 1980s-style computers like it’s a gravity gun at her enemies, which was my method for combat in most cases. The game does introduce more enemies as you progress, like fast ninjas that are more difficult to dodge unless you're slowing down time, riflemen whose bullets can be quite deadly, and even giant tank bosses that shoot rockets that you have to repel back to them.

(So. much. physics.)

There really isn’t a whole lot else to how Gemini plays. Each level has Cassandra jumping around platforms, occasionally solving puzzles by telekinesis, time travel or combat. Each level is no more than 10-15 minutes each, and dying isn’t particularly a big problem unless you miss a jump or forget to slow down time to dodge fan blades. There were some interesting puzzles where I’d have to switch time periods to recover data or move a generator onto a power switch, but nothing particularly perplexing.

(This game was made in Unreal Engine 4. It definitely looks like something made in Unreal Engine 4.)

In a sense, the Half-Life 2 and Mirror’s Edge comparisons I made earlier are rather fitting for a game like this, as my common combat solution was to grab a physics object and hurl it at the enemy enough times for them to die. Eventually I learned to use some of the hazards the game gives you to make fights a little easier, but what I did every time was about the same. Even a lot of the platforming wasn't particularly difficult, which was likely made for an audience who may not be super expert gamers.

(The text message thing is through Cassandra's fancy glasses that Alex gives her early on. It's quite a unique way to depict subtitles...)

The rest of the plot involves Cassandra slowly figuring out what happened to her while doing Mason's bidding. Gemini ends with Cassandra battling with Mason and ends up being this silly little boss fight that eventually ties everything together, leaving very few loose ends. 

What surprised me was how short this game is. It took me roughly 2 hours to beat it, about the length of two full episodes of the TV show with commercials. I wasn’t expecting a sprawling 10 hour-long epic, but it did feel like it ended too soon, as it came and went with no fanfare. I understand this was a licensed title made to capitalize on a TV show, but they could've added more to the game, like extra puzzles outside of the main story. Something to give people incentive to come back to the game. After I finished this game, I honestly had no drive to ever come back to it.

You would think that's the end of this Heroes Reborn side-story, right? Actually, no.

("Look! I too can dodge bullets, for some reason!")

Something I didn’t know when I first played this game was that there was a second Heroes Reborn game by the same development studio. Titled Enigma: Heroes Reborn, this one involves Dahlia, the supporting character you meet in this game and actually appeared in Heroes Reborn proper. As opposed to Gemini which was more combat focused, Enigma seems more puzzle focused, more akin to Antichamber or The Ball. Sadly it’s only available on Apple devices these days, something I don’t have. I kinda wished it too got ported over to PC, because I probably would’ve had more fun with a physics based puzzle game than Gemini’s combat-driven approach.

So what happened to developer Phosphor Studios? Well, they were still making games after the Heroes Reborn games, making mostly VR for things like Jurassic World and Ford Trucks. The only other original game they made was The Brookhaven Experiment, a VR horror shooter. Earlier this year, they got acquired by People Can Fly, makers of Bulletstorm and Outriders, which isn't surprising in this current climate. Considering their VR pedigree, perhaps maybe we’ll see VR Outriders from them in the future.

(Physics and time manipulation. You sure this wasn't made in 2010?)

Gemini: Heroes Reborn isn’t amazing, but it’s a surprisingly competent and short little action puzzle game. It’s $3 on Steam – and also on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but not at $3 – and it’s about the length of an average movie, so you’ll probably find some enjoyment in it if you like puzzle platformers.

While I don’t think Gemini: Heroes Reborn has me itching to watch Heroes, I’m glad it exists because licensed video games should always exist. And not in some lazy cross-promotion in some other game. I always find some charm in these games in some way, of which I honestly wouldn’t have known existed if it weren’t for the speedruns for this game, which is quite entertaining to watch if you're not interested in the game itself.

Now that I've been thinking about licensed video games, I wonder if that Space Jam: A New Legacy game is any good...