Aporia: Beyond The Valley

Aporia is a beautiful game with an interesting, wordless storytelling method. While the review is negative, it is worth noting that this is not a bad game, but a pretty good game with significant problems. While visually stunning, the game has a number of mechanical issues, pacing issues, and very odd gameplay choices that hold it back from being great, and generally worth its regular price. It's worth noting that while stunning, it suffers from performance issues from extremely frequent lag spikes to crashes. It also contains a number of unpatched, bizarre bugs, such as ladders frequently sending you far into the sky and killing you or injuring you with fall damage. The game itself is mostly a walking similar with light story elements and a few puzzles. Most of the puzzles are extremely easy with a few exceptions, notably the excellent basin, waterways, and mirror puzzles. However, some, like the pillar puzzle, end up being extremely finnicky and fail to give the player appropriate direction. While in a sense I like the freedom of this lack of direction, the game is often poor at subtly directing the player, something very needed in a game with such an open experience. For example, the light system. You have a light stick needed to solve certain puzzles throughout the game with a limited resource available to refill your light stick. The devs intentionally hide many of these refill vials throughout chapters, making them interesting to find, but because they're a limited resource, it appears you'd be rewarded for saving them and not seeking them out unless you absolutely need them. However, the game rewards an achievement for using ever vial in a level, so you're both rewarded and punished for trying to seek out the vials, which is very odd. It is also worth noting that the light stick itself is only directly involved in 2-3 real good puzzles, the rest of the time it is exclusively used for environmental interactions (opening doors, flashlight, growing bridges, etc.) and forcing you to go out of your way to refill it to keep interacting with the environment. The game also only tells you you're entering a point of no return once in chapter 3, even though all the chapter ends (which are poorly marked) are points of no return, and certain areas (like the mine) are also points of no return, making it confusing why it is only there (likely because of the collectibles in chapter 3, but these are unnecessary to beat the game or obtain a different ending, which is not made clear at all). Another example of tis is some of their hidden items. As mentioned, the game lacks some needed polish, with many out of bounds areas easily accessible due to poor boundary markers, and terrain prone to ketting the player stuck, especially at these boundaries. As such, the player (out of fear of softlocking) is rewarded by staying within bounds and not attempting to explore the corners of the map. At the same time, the devs have hidden a few collectibles and secret areas in these boundaries, which they have also punished the player for going into, which is a bizarre choice to both reward and punish the player for the same action. It makes it feel less like freedom and more like the devs not putting enough thought into game mechanics for such an open ended experience. The story suffers greatly from this same issue, as while there are pictograms slowly showing pieces of the story, there are also a number of incomprehensible and non-story-related pictograms in the same style for showing game mechanics or simply as neat things to look at, making figuring out what is story and what is style more difficult. Additionally, places like especially chapter 4 have a plethora of repeating pictograms in a small area depicting the same thing (and in chapter 4's case, they do nothing to further the story, they are all effectively for gameplay only). Finally, in the same vain, there are a number of useless gimmick mechanics that do effectively nothing but slow the framerate down. Most notably, the game has a number of completely unnecessary physics objects used to knock bricks out of a passageway twice in the tneire game, knock down a rock once, and for a weight puzzle (which could easily have used static objects like the fire pillars in chapter 4). The pulley functions are also somewhat finnickey and slow down movement more than they make the experience feel immersive. The health function also serves little purpose except to integrate a story point, as most things do or should kill you in one hit (big fall damage, stealth sections, rapids) while only needing it for small fall damage and spending too much time underwater is confusing, especially since there is no drowning bar, you only know you need air when you start taking damage. I would say the water physics are also useless, but the water is pretty and is used creatively for good puzzles, so it gets a pass :) While other reviews show much of the game's excellent qualities, I wanted to show how bad its quality of life can get, especially for a game that is not especially cheap. It really needed to focus on the core exprience (visuals (not bogged down by lag), story, puzzles, good use of the game's core light stick mechanic) rather than padding it with "immersive" elements that slow both the gameplay and the framerate. I would only recommend this on a sale of half price or more, to someone looking for a shorter, pretty puzzle platformer (it is not stress free, there are horror-like chase/stealth sequences) or someone looking for a speedrunning game, as this game appears to be rife with opportunities for speedrunnning exploits.

Excellent jeux de remue-méninges!

Cool game Bubu and Dudu give two paws up.

Excellent graphics, puzzles are not too hard or easy to solve. Non-violent.

More confusing then not

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