Total Reload Review

It’s a tale as old as video games themselves — your silent protagonist boots up alone in an unfamiliar room, with only an unseen speaker to guide you. This speaker, Hawking, spends these early moments guiding the player through the basics (such as movement, crouching, and puzzle-solving), but he also lets on a bit more. It is here that we get our first hints of meaning. That, at its core, Total Reload is a game about solitude, loneliness, and working your way through it. 

Publisher: TORSHOCK

Developer: TORSHOCK

Platform: Played on PC

Availability: Released on Nov 7, 2025 for PC (Steam)

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You learn right from the beginning that Hawking is alone. The universe is empty, save you and Hawking, but Hawking has a plan: restart the universe. The specifics of this plan and details of Hawking’s past aren’t elaborated on much in the early moments, instead being spread out across the entire game through murals as you progress. Often, Hawking will just tell you the relevant details, but in many cases you must formulate the question by looking at the appropriate images in a specific order to form a question for Hawking to answer. It’s not the most elegant solution to communication, as you’ll find yourself looking at the images accidentally quite often or forming a sentence in a way that the game hadn’t devised an answer for, but it mostly gets the job done. 

To do that, we must contend with a series of puzzles in order to get everything back online for Hawking to complete his masterplan. These puzzles start off quite simple, featuring only wires you must connect to terminals and switches to change the direction of the power. Most often, the main objective of any given area is simply to guide all available power to a single terminal in an area, which then opens up pathways for you to continue forward. As the game progresses, the puzzles become more intricate, introducing new mechanics and objects that you must use to complete each task. 

Most of these puzzles are curated in a way that allows for only one possible solution or pathway for advancement. You can't run fast enough or jump high enough to cheat your way onto a platform or unexpected area, so engaging with the puzzle exactly as intended is your only recourse (most of the time). Due to the limiting nature of your character’s movement, you are also forced to endure Total Reload’s biggest flaw — moving platforms. 

The speed at which platforms move in this game is genuinely a problem. It is excruciatingly slow, and they feature prominently in the gameplay and puzzle-solving.

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The first platform I ever set my feet upon was an omen. I turned it on, hopped atop the platform and then it started moving…without me. My character model simply shifted off to the side, falling to my death. Such a thing is unfortunate, but not experience-breaking as a one off, so I set the platform to return and waited. And waited some more. 

Oh, that is very slow.

The speed at which platforms move in this game is genuinely a problem. It is excruciatingly slow, and they feature prominently in the gameplay and puzzle-solving. Waiting for these platforms has constituted more than half of the 10 hour total runtime of the game. Any time you fall from a platform, or power up something before you are supposed to, or accidentally do a task out of order, you’ll have to find a way to send that platform back to you without messing up the flow of the puzzle. I think it’s easy to say that you should simply do the puzzle right the first time, to look around and make sure your next move is the correct one, but many of the interactions are difficult or impossible to know with certainty before pressing a button; how each system works inside each puzzle is bespoke, meaning you must first engage with it and explore before you can get the full picture.

And so you must wait. Waiting in the large, mostly barren rooms in which Total Reload takes place, I was forced to contend with something unexpected — loneliness. Not the loneliness of the characters in-game, but my own instead. I couldn’t help but feel alone, as there were no actions to take, and no people to speak to in-game. Even outside the game, it isn’t as if I could talk to friends about my frustrations. I was forced to contemplate my mistakes, and the challenges Total Reload posed — intended or not. Perhaps in that way, the waiting is sometimes welcome, as it offers you a moment to breathe and collect yourself before moving on to the next solution.

Environments are a bit drab, which seems reasonable for a robot's abode.

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To that end, the puzzles themselves are not particularly difficult and I think that’s fine. They force you to think about your actions, and plan your next steps. They keep things interesting enough to give you a few “ah-hah!” moments in between the plodding and waiting. And through all of that work and effort, there is no reward — at least not in a traditional sense. Solutions don’t generate coins or equipment, and there are no achievements or anything of that nature to trigger the Pavlovian responses we’ve become so accustomed to. The work is the reward. 

I wonder if that's how Hawking felt. Those countless moments spent just plugging away at his work, hoping to see it through — was it worth the effort? I think so, at least in the right mindset. Total Reload offers an almost comforting take on the puzzle-platformer. There are challenges, sure, but it is almost entirely a low-stakes walk in the park, with puzzles only tickling the brain rather than wringing it dry. Combined with the quiet hum of the platforms and clanking of boxes that fill an otherwise barren soundscape, it becomes almost mesmerizing after a time. 

I do wish the platforms moved faster, though.

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Image Credits: TORSHOCK

Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.