Al'ulA

Unlike how I usually do, I'm going to be brief. On the balance, I'm giving this a thumbs up. It has some significant issues that got in the way of me enjoying my time here, but enormous kudos for an imaginative concept and setting. The issues can be solved, I'm optimistic. The game is set in what feels like the peak of the Arabian golden age, in Morocco. The conceit is, with a peculiar gadget, one can rotate bits of the room to achieve goals. It's kind of like being on the inside of a Rubik's Cube, if you will. Folks, I was always bad at Rubik's Cube. I had one as a child when they were trendy, I never bothered working out the routine for solving it. It was easier to dismantle and rebuild it. And now being on the inside of a cube, I was more flummoxed than ever and failed to work out what I needed to do. That's a me problem, and I'm sure if I go back to it later maybe I'll do better. But there were issues. The English narration is cut too short. The protagonist speaks with reverb in the intro cutscene, but the samples are cut after her last spoken word, so the reverb is abruptly chopped off. It took me a bit out of the moment. Audio, especially narration, is really important to me. Others clearly feel differently. Keybinds are a must, and are missing. Key sliders for FOV (but no other graphics setting?) have no numbers. I worked out the exact FOV setting I should have with basic math, so the numbers are nice. The game appears to have been set up for an AZERTY keyboard, as the tooltip that popped up wanted me to press A and E, though Q and E worked as expected. So it respects QWERTY, but I have peculiar keyboard bindings I've grown accustomed to. The lack of bindings makes it hostile to lefties. The performance is tolerable, it feels. I didn't run a framerate counter but it felt a bit sluggish. It being a puzzle game, I'm not sure it really mattered. So I hope the devs go back, allow some keybinding, some graphics setting adjustments, and I may well go back to this and give it another go. In the interim, I can say I've never seen anything else like it, and that gets a thumbs up even if I'm not going to try it out again in the near future.