Aethernaut

A number of reviewers have commented on the somewhat clunky graphics. I do agree with that (especially having played Talos Principle 2 immediately before playing this) but I can forgive that as this was created by a small team that can never compete with the larger developers, and game-play is way more important than any fancy graphics. And it's game-play that brings me on to the major failings of this game... The game premise draws heavily from the likes of Talos and Portal, but these games start with gentle tutorial, usually starting with a cube and pressure-plate. This game however is straight in with at least 10 different game mechanisms, and little or no guidance; you just have to fathom it out for yourself. Also, some of the puzzles are really hard and repetitive. I was doing ok until I hit the time-portal mechanic. Then it got so hard that I got bored and just started auto-completing the puzzles. Looking at the percentage of players that gain each achievement, only around 25% actually complete the tutorial section. And only around 6% manage to get to the final set of puzzles. That's a terrible attrition rate, but I'm not surprised. There was a bug in one of the early puzzles where a door wouldn't open. However, resetting and re-playing the puzzle opens the door. Not only was that frustrating, but it cast doubt in my mind about all the other puzzles I struggled with; did I get it wrong, or is it a bug? I encountered a few other bugs, but they didn't really affect game-play. It's such a shame, because this is so nearly a decent game, but the learning curve needs shallowing-out, and some of the puzzles need to be made easier and/or less repetitive. I'd give this a score of 4/10 as I did actually enjoy a number of the puzzles.

I kinda do not recommend it overall but for the two thirds of the game I was actually enjoying my time so I will give it a very soft recommend for the 6-7 hours of enjoyment I got from the game. -slight spoilers on a game mechanic- I do not intend to continue to game after 7 hours. After the introduction of time travel, every puzzle got supeeeeeer long to solve, like you need to do something and wait for your other selves to do the action. However, it is crazy clunky and not like in talos, that counter always goes on, and after some trials either you need to reset the puzzle and calculate every move accordingly, or you have 20 other selves running around everywhere and you wait couple of minutes to catch up with them. Honestly, it was super tedious and boring to understand the mechanic of this type of puzzle which as far as I can tell plagues the last one third of the game. I was immediately put off by it. The game does not try to make you understand how this janky feature works too, and I am not wasting my time on understanding wtf is going on so I can play a game. Sadge

more intense puzzle solving then portal!

An unfinished & unpolished game full of genius ideas. It's sad to give a game a negative review after playing it for so long, but I really can't recommend it in its current state. Some people complain about unclear tutorials, but they really aren't that hard to understand. The game doesn't really hold your hand and you need to interpret some puzzles for yourself, but it's designed in a way that this naturally happens while playing. The classic "aha"-moment everyone knows who plays puzzle games. + Fantastic Puzzles. Teleporting, Time Travel, Dimension-Switching, this game has it all. + Amazing Soundtrack + Interesting Story - Framerate is not only unstable, but VERY low even on low settings with a strong PC. - Inconsistent Lighting. Some areas have light sources and are still very dark, while areas that should be dark are often pretty bright, even without light sources nearby - Very bad graphics overall. Art Direction is way more important, but it also fails in that aspect (except for the last area) - Changing the resolution sometimes crashed the game - Tons of bugs (more details below) - Voice Acting is just.... okay. Not terrible, but also not good. - Lots of cheese. If this intended to give the player multiple solutions - cool, but it didn't feel like that, since some puzzles can be entirely skipped by tricking the system - Many out-of-bounds glitches, most of them happened randomly to me. If you glitch out of bounds, the game autosaves and you have no backup save, your save file is basically corrupted - Many softlocks. You can reset each room so this isn't that problematic, but the loading times are also very long - spoken and written text don't always match - Placeholder text in the menus - Menus showed wrong numbers for certain rooms & recordings Bugs: - Lamps randomly turn around sometimes, making some puzzles (especially room 8 of the final hubworld) impossible - Half the achievements don't trigger - Some switches just remain pressed even if nothing stands on them, and there's no green light on them - Portals can block light, leading to lots of cheese - Some doors just won't open even if you have the correct light on them, restarting the puzzle fixes this The final area, however, ran super smoothly and only had 1 bugged puzzle room. It also has pretty good art direction and an amazing atmosphere. It feels like most of the budget was spent on the finale to the game. Still, this is super impressive for a (mostly) solo dev, especially when keeping in mind how big this game is. I think less rooms and more polish would've been a much better choice. If the framerate & bugs got fixed, I'd update my review to positive, because the effort & ambition is clearly there. Just not the time & budget necessary for such a big & complex game, unfortunately.

It's not that bad of a puzzle game. If you can figure things out despite the lack of good tutorials, you can find some clever puzzle design to keep you interested. And the story is not half bad either, albeit poorly voice-acted. But ultimately what caused me to stop playing is the incredibly poor optimization that causes frequent lag (despite its ugly graphics) and caused my CPU to at one point give an overheating warning. Update: Came back to the game with the idea to lower the graphics settings. It worked somewhat to reduce lag and overheating.

If I could get my money back I would in a heartbeat - worst puzzle game EVER. The puzzles aside from being overly complicated - some of them impossible so it forces you to use the automatic "Solve Puzzle" feature which I had to use on several, The graphics are sub-par at best, the narrator's voice grates on my nerves like fingers on a chalkboard. The story line is bland. All in all a -5/10 in my book of puzzle games - if you want a good puzzle series that offers challenging yet simplistic puzzles with beautiful graphics I highly suggest The Room series by Fireproof Games. (Not paid or sponsored by Fireproof Games) I have played the entire series and it was definitely less stressful than this one.

After having played this game for 50 hours, I'm ready to give my thoughts. First off, for how few people made this game, it's a much larger game than I expected, for instance I still haven't even collected all the vials yet (you get them for completing puzzles. I'm at 82/94 rn). The game does a good job using tutorial puzzles to show what each item does, and gets more and more complicated, adding more elements as you go on. Though the game has its fair share of glitches as there were only a few people coding it, the graphics and audio design matched the atmosphere of the game very well. It also explains the story as you complete the puzzles, so the more of the game you complete the more you understand the backstory of the characters involved. The one major drawback of this game, however, would be its performance (this is just my experience, maybe a better PC can run it better). I played this game the whole time on 60 fps, and for most of the beginning it ran fine. After I entered the Narrows (a main area in the middle of the game), I encountered this issue. The Hotel, Vivarium and Excavation Site were especially bad. It also can freeze for a second or two when hitting different triggers. I would constantly be playing at an fps of around 20-40 in most of these areas, messing with various graphics settings to try and make it better to no avail. The puzzles in these areas ran a bit better, but it would still be around 40-50 fps. It's a shame because of how much this takes away from the experience. As I said before, this game has its fair share of glitches, but there was nothing really game breaking. The worst glitch I had was that it wouldn't let me collect a couple of vials, but it fixed itself after I reloaded the game. There were also a couple doors that didn't open the first time around for whatever reason, but opened when I reloaded the game. In my opinion, this is a decent portal-inspired puzzle-platformer made by a small group of people, and I commend them for their work. Would I recommend this game to someone? Sure! Give it a try. Personally, however, I would wait until it goes on sale. Not quite sure if it's enough to be worth $17. Overall, I'd rate this game a 6.7/10, and if the performance issues were fixed, maybe around a 7.5/10.

Poorly designed mechanics and puzzles. There's zero satisfaction solving anything. It mostly feels like you're stumbling around and moving ♥♥♥♥ until it works. There's never any a-ha moment. Not worth playing.

Bonsoir, Bon, j'ai fait les 2/3 du jeu... et je ne pense pas aller au-delà; je n'ai plus envie! L'histoire et le concept sont sympas, et c'est le type de jeu que je peux aimer. Mais le gameplay n'a pas toujours été très clair, il y a des bugs, il lague (là, je vais laisser le bénéfice du doute: c'est peut-être mon matériel), et la version française (orthographe, grammaire, conjugaison) est absolument horrible (faite par un mauvais traducteur en ligne) et me fait saigner des yeux!!!!! Bref, déception pour moi (j'aurais pu acheter un ou plusieurs bons jeux avec cet achat), et tristesse pour les concepteurs! Pourquoi faire un jeu si c'est pour mal le "finir" de la sorte...??

tl;dr story about a gay couple adopting a child dragged for a couple hours while you go solving puzzles in a glitchy, instable game. Gays adopting thrown into the story for no reason whatsoever. It's a pity if you don't agree, he got your money already. After playing a couple hours, you end up in the middle of a story about a gay couple trying to adopt a child. Not only there is no warning about it before buying, but there is Zero reasons or need for that. And is not something lateral: for hours you (or your child to whom you gave the game as a gift) get dragged about how normal and great that is. Well, maybe you think it is, but lots of people think otherwise, and there has to be a warning about it for parents. I feel completely blindsided. This game is sold and bought all over the world, so if you weaponize games in order to fight for the woke cause, you should warn about it. Over 90% of my country is against gay couples adopting, so why don't you tell me in advance the story is about that? Bad, bad policy to push woke ideology in a logic puzzles game. The developer got my money, and he made me have a talk with a child that i wanted to have later, because for some reason he decided he knows better than parents. Never again buying nothing from him.