Backbone, a 2021 adventure game, was one of the hardest games I’ve ever had to review. The concepts, the artwork, the music, the atmosphere were all right. Not just good—they felt correct. Those pieces of Backbone fit together so elegantly it felt like it was bound to be one of the best indie games of the year. A demo promised a proper murder mystery where you’d solve puzzles and make choices to determine the fate of the world around you. But the full game was nothing like the demo, and to this day the Steam reviews of Backbone are complex and confused.Â
