Chained Together Review (PC)

Chained Together tells me everything that I need to know about another person. Without the gift of clairvoyance or an encyclopedic intervention to paint their greatest strengths and weaknesses, a simple, albeit sticky situation is often enough to illuminate a picture and give me a basic insight into their traits, their goals, and how they’re likely to make my life a living nightmare. Take this unfortunate predicament, for example. In Chained Together, you aren’t just aiming to emerge from the shackles that bind you to a fiery world; you are working as a team to blaze a trail through the very pits of hell, not as a hive mind, but as two distinctly different entities, both of whom have little to no control over the slack whatsoever. And if you think that sounds like a pain in the backside (or a thorn in your ankles, in this instance), then you’re on the right track. Oh, Chained Together certainly isn’t a picnic; it’s pain, suffering, and frustration knotted together.

The game is exactly what you think it is: a relentless volleying maneuver sim that hands both you and a companion the painfully difficult task of navigating the seven circles of Hell whilst shackled together. It is, as one would expect it to be, a daunting excursion that’s mostly comprised of highs and lows, rage and disappointment. Oh, and a lot of bickering.

As a co-op game at its very core, Chained Together bathes in the hopes that you might just fall into a million pieces and sever the connection with your closest friends. It knows what it is, and it doesn’t shy away from its role as the all-seeing slaughterer of companionship. In any other situation you would give such a concept the cold shoulder. But here, in Chained Together, you embrace it like an old friend. You hate that you love it, and you love that you hate it. Here, there’s just no middle ground — only a dull gray and a tiny voice at the back of your head that tells you that you can, with the right amount of pressure, overcome just about any obstacle that the world puts out before you. Annoyingly, it tells the other poor soul who’s shackled to you the opposite. Thus, we have friction—the kindling to set a former friendship alight.

The idea isn’t all that difficult to wrap your head around. In fact, the game is quite simply about tackling various obstacle courses—moving platforms, floating objects, and, if you’re feeling really brave, a lava pit that rises with you and your friends as you mindlessly jackknife around in a fit of rage. The point is, if you strip Fall Guys of all its color and bubblegum aesthetics, then you more or less have Chained Together. Take the candy-coated set pieces out of the mix and swap them for ashen columns and hellish environments, and you essentially have the basic setup for this devilishly simple cortex.

Chained Together allows up to four players to bind themselves together to tackle one of several dynamic playgrounds, with each of its in-game worlds boasting a solid variety of challenges to overcome. The idea, again, is simple: collaborate with your friends, and work together to navigate and ultimately carve a path through the stages. Being shackled together, you must learn to work as a team, and you must be willing to slip and fall, bark and weep for as long as it takes to reach the final hurdle. Conceptually, it’s about as straightforward as they come. Mechanically, however, it’s a nightmare on stilts. But, that’s a rage game for you. There are no winners here.

It goes without saying at this point, but if you are looking for an opportunity to collaborate with your friends and drink from the same cup whilst attaining all of the same lavish benefits, then you might be better suited for another world. Frankly, this isn’t the walk in the park that you want it to be; it’s a grueling slog through hell and back—an irritatingly slow and painful exercise that will either leave you feeling sick to your stomach or, at worst, pulling the hairs from your scalp as you traipse the same beaten path again and again…and again. It isn’t that it’s laden with hundreds of buttons and control systems; it’s that as little as one wrong move can ultimately lead to an epic failure and a lot of arguments. But, again, if you’ve made it this far, then you probably already know of the consequences.

If you can actively ignore the bubbling anger that goes with the situation, then you might just find a “fun” co-op experience here. With a sizable selection of levels to carve through and a solid foundation for your team to evolve with, you might also find that there’s plenty of bang for your buck here, too. It will still drive you nuts, but that’s to be expected from a rage game, really. The question is, what’s a small pat on the back after a dozen hours of endless torment worth to you?

Verdict

Chained Together is as painfully grueling as it is fun, which of course begs the question: How, with so little to offer aside from the odd pat on the back, does it manage to keep us venturing back to the root of hell to voluntarily shackle ourselves together again? It’s a bit of a strange one, but something that most fans of the rage scene will likely have a plausible explanation for. For me, it’s a love-hate thing. I hate Chained Together — yet I’m also one of the first in line to be subjected to its madness, even after so many epic fails. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy all over again.

I won’t sugarcoat it. Chained Together will test your patience, and it will make you want to be anywhere else that isn’t in the arms of incompetent people. But, when all’s said and done, you will also come to the bitter realization that it is an annoyingly entertaining experience, warts and all. It’s Hell on a silver platter, basically. We’ll let you decide whether or not it’s worth cozying up with for the slightest speck of warmth.