Quick Review: Size Matters

Wonder if Hank Pym ever had to deal with that while discovering his particles…

It's a complex process... processing...

The most recent game in this series of quick reviews, Size Matters, was developed by Mazen Games, published by GrabTheGames and released on March 12th, 2021. You are a scientist who accidentally ingested a formula that makes them shrink, and must race against time to create an antidote and return to their normal size… while they still can. At some point, they’re going to be too small to operate any of the machines around the lab or press any buttons, equating a Game Over.

The Tutorial shows the basic controls and teaches how to use most of the equipment in the lab. The preset controls: Move with WASD, interact with E, grab and carry items with the mouse button, jump with Space… there are more controls to sprint (Left Shift), crouch (C), open/close things (F), or cross a formula (Q). In the settings, you can also change the game’s language and toggle some options to make things smoother. When I first played without touching the settings, the motion blur from merely looking around was so bad I couldn’t tell what was in front of me half the time, it was almost making me sick.

Not so bad when the picture is small, but you
can see the blur from moving and... yeah. No.

Customize e-ve-ry-thing.

A cool element about this game is that the experience is fully customizable. There are some pre-existing modes and difficulties (Beginner, Normal, Hard, Crazy, Low Gravity and Tiny, with seven empty slots for your own custom games). Six different laboratories can be explored. You can edit to your heart’s desire any details about the player character, from their height to their speed and jumping capabilities, but also the number of formulas required, the time it takes for any machine to process a recipe, and the finite amount of time it takes until you hit Game Over (max: 1 hour).

If that looks complicated, wait till you see
when you have 15 starting ingredients.

When playing a level, you first need to gather the ingredients and formulas, then use the lab equipment: Microwave, sink (water is frequently an ingredient), chemical processor (to combine two ingredients) and code combiner (which can transform an ingredient, but you need the precise 4-digit code along with it). You also have access to a reverter in case you make the wrong formula and must go back to the previous ingredients. These manipulations will lead to the creation of three keys to be inserted in the antidote maker to cancel the shrinking and win the game.

Yep, I'm a lot shorter than I was 20 minutes ago.

It won’t be easy; sometimes the formulas are well-hidden (I failed once because I couldn’t find one of the formulas, which required a code to be used), and there’s a lot of drawers to look into. As you shrink, you might start focusing more on finding ways to move around the lab and onto the tables, using any of the stuff lying around – chairs, planks, keyboards, etc.

Okay, full disclosure on my experience: I love the idea. It’s quite a challenging game since your time is so limited and there’s a lot of manipulations that must be made, even with the lowest number of formulas. You can tell that you are indeed shrinking, and that time is running out – and eventually even your equipment will be hard to access. You can set the game to include cupcakes, which will stop the shrinking, and croissants, which will make items larger, both momentarily. The variety – a fully customizable experience, with pre-existing modes and six labs – is also great.

Well, I'm well and truly fucked...

Unfortunately, I hated the controls. The character is hard to control walking around. They’ll drop an item they carry with E as soon as they hit an obstacle. Most of the times I played, I couldn’t even jump – the game hardly ever responded to me hitting the Space bar. I did jump, but it rarely worked. Items grabbed to make ramps would never set quite right. Maybe a lot of that could be tweaked in the settings, but I feel like it might not have helped all that much – especially with how tricky it was to move the character around. Also, for some reason, any of the pre-set modes were locked and remained locked even after I finished a custom game, so I have no idea how to access them. If you set the maximum of three of each type of manipulation, that’s 15 ingredients and 19 formulas – borderline impossible in an hour unless you find everything early, keep track of absolutely everything on a sheet of paper, and flawlessly execute the steps.

So, an amazing idea with a highly flawed execution, but the game’s still young – with some luck, there will be updates that resolve some of the issues I ran into. Be wary of those, but perhaps your computer will run the game better than mine, so who knows – maybe it’ll be better on your end.

Size Matters is available on Steam for 8.99 USD.