👪 Family Man XSX Review 7/10 "Are you a family guy?" 👪 @brokenbears #IndieGames #GameDev

Family Man is a voxel-based, first-person adventure that puts you in the shoes of a man who must provide for his family in dire circumstances…and against the clock.

Following one of the strongest introduction sequences in memory – which I won’t go into here for spoiler reasons – the player character ends up in a situation whereby they must pay an ever-increasing amount of cash, daily - to the local mob, whilst also having enough cash left over to pay for medicine and food for their partner and son, as well as ensuring that the house is kept clean and tidy – and full of love.

The game starts off casually enough, you can choose to do household chores to raise the relationship with your family, or head outside to earn some cash. Each day, you’ll have to give rising amounts of moolah to the local mobster (who lurks around the pet store), before heading into town to do some honest work for the townsfolk, or perhaps get some extra cash by doing shadier work for the mob – which pays more, but (understandably) affects the overall mood of the town.

The game takes the span of twenty days to complete, and it’s possible to get game overs in many ways; losing all your health, not being able to pay your daily mob payments, it’s also possible for your family to leave you because you’ve neglected them too much. What this all means is that the game starts off feeling pretty breezy, but very quickly turns into a race against time as you use the allocated time in the day (1 second real-time = 1-minute in-game time) to get everything in hand.

The town itself comprises some shops, a cinema, a hospital, an industrial area, a mayoral mansion, a beach and farmland - but is easy to traverse, and isn’t too expansive. This intense time management side of the game is something that I can imagine will split players.

I understand that it is such a focal point to add tension that escalates as the game reaches its climax (there are RPG elements in how you can get upgrades from experience that make things slightly easier, but the clock will always be your biggest enemy), but I was so enamoured and emotionally engaged in the main thrust of the narrative - providing for a small family in a situation where money is very much an object – that I kind of wanted more time to immerse myself in the protagonists’ world, without pegging it around everywhere in a panic.

There are so many nice touches that pull at various emotions, that - again – I don’t want to spoil here, that me keeping one eye on the ever-ticking clock – whilst dashing around trying to earn cash, felt like it was pulling me away from the aspects of the game that truly resonated with me.

There are also other things worth mentioning. As stated above, this is a voxel-based game and I understand that some people can’t click with the stripped-back visuals, although I tend to gravitate towards them, as it allows great, well-written and idiosyncratic games such as this to be released without a preposterous visual budget.

The music and sound effects are pretty standard and sit in the background as opposed to being memorable - which isn’t a huge issue - but the pace at which some of the bars (family life, health, hunger etc.) deplete, in combination with the ticking clock, really does make this feel like a time management game as opposed to the quite evocative, dark drama that it really, really could be.

The premise of Family Man, the incredibly strong opening and relatable familiarity really hit home for me, but as the game moved on, I found myself disengaging from the elements that initially won me over.