Chained Together on Steam reminds you of how platform-exclusives can make you jealous. Chained Climb Together on the PS5 reminds you of the value of copyright law.
Yes, the two are different games and not remotely connected – unless you count the sweet value of inspiration and, because this writer is too poor to handle a court case, nothing more.
Chained Together is a game that makes me nostalgic in the right way: I remember the Xbox 360 days, when streamers started to become popular as this title would be immediately seized upon and made extremely popular. Team up with friends, get literally chained together and be told to embark on a series of platforming challenges.
The whole idea is ridiculous, designed to be so pointlessly challenging while always being silly. It’s a recipe for hilarity, one which only gets more potent as you become more driven to actually become skilled at something so inherently slapstick. It is comedy and I immediately wish I could drop my friends a text and get playing on my PS5.
The motive you can’t ignore
Well, I could go on the PlayStation Store and look for it. There’s an option that seems so similar; that it must be it, there’s no way someone would make a game then call it the same as another game, with the added word being the core action being constantly undertaken. I must have just misheard the title.
I think my sarcasm is justified, though: it’s hard to ignore the potentially very malicious element to Chained Climb Together. This isn’t a game playing homage to another title by taking inspiration but going for a very different image and approach, like Brawlhalla taking the platform fighter style from Super Smash Bros. No, this is like a game calling itself ‘Super Mash Bros’ and selling it on a non-Nintendo platform and, as much as I want to see knock-off Nintendo characters made out of mashed potato beat each other up, it isn’t right.
It isn’t a homage; it’s a mimicry designed to take money from people aiming to buy the other game. Its entire existence depends on consumers mistaking it for another game. That is pretty unforgivable.
Okay, so how bad is it?
So, what is Chained Climb Together on PS5? I’ll bite but I will not pay; for complete honesty I’m just engaging with this game through clips on YouTube. It plays like a credible attempt to murder your eyes faster than a bullet. Yes, it is incredibly inconsistent with frame rates and is very jagged to play. It is very easy to swing the camera around and see out of bounds and it looks basic by modern standards. Problematically though, at a glance, it does have the potential to look okay. It’s also going for the same, albeit more basic, art style of Chained Together, which again, adds to my concerns.
Hilariously, collision detection seems to be quite off when it comes to the platforms which, in a game predicated around climbing, is quite a big problem.
The real issue, though, is that it isn’t immediately obvious. The main picture on the store isn’t in-game and looks notably better than the in-game graphics. The developer even has another knock-off on the store, Chained Survive Together, but hilariously that one gets the player name font so wrong, it looks very ‘I’m 13 and handing in an essay’. So at least that one is quite evidently a poorly made game.
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The picture used to advertise Chained Climb Together on the Playstation Store.
You know the one reason I can attack this as much as I am? Laziness. They barely changed the name.
This developer isn’t the only offender here, but they are the most egregious, especially when it comes to the name. Chained Towards Heaven looks graphically so overtly basic that there’s no chance of even a slight glance causing confusion. It reminds you of some of the early-PS2 era of gaming and even then there were games that looked better back then. Chained Through Hell again makes more effort with the name and is also very clearly stated to be a one-man project.
Chained Climb Together makes an attempt to fool others, though: the graphics aren’t great but it can look passable in some of the screenshots presented on the PlayStation Store.
Please, just don’t play it
So no, don’t play it, please. Chained Together will either get ported or another game which takes inspiration from, but launches an honest effort to be distinct, will come along. No one wants to see dishonest and immoral tactics succeed. Save yourself the money and find something else to play.
The reviews on the store have been consistently highly negative, so I don’t think what I’ve written here is a particularly unique opinion. Heck, even one of the YouTube clips I watched of Chained Climb Together acknowledges that it might just be a knock-off.
Also, to be clear, with online stores as flooded with games as they are, there are bound to be more titles like this, taking far too much inspiration from other games. The exact line where homage becomes malicious would be a subjective one and that makes it very hard to police so to speak. I’m sure there are hundreds of titles I could have written this exact piece about, I just so happen to have been alerted to this example.
I can understand the financial temptation to make this kind of game: truth be told I never understand how major games can even be profitable given the insane figures that go into making them. So something like this is probably quite financially healthy for the developer.
That one sticking point…
As much as I try to find ways to be sympathetic to Chained Climb Together, to give more antidote to balance the bane so to speak, there is just one part that reassures me that I should be sticking the knife in.
It’s the name. I still cannot fathom a good counter-argument to it, or even an argument how it isn’t the bare minimum required to distinguish itself while still aiming to profit from confusion. It could have been called a lot of other things that would have sought to show that, while it is inspired by another title, it is trying to make its own identity. It isn’t though, it is literally called the title, with the primary action of the game stuck between the original two words. It’s like calling something ‘Call of Shoot Duty’ or ‘Final-You’ll-Always-End-Up-Killing-God-Fantasy’.
A name change is the bare minimum, because in its present state it’s an example of how the gaming industry can and should be doing better than this.