Aporia: Beyond The Valley

I got this game for 80p so difficult to rate poorly. This is a decent attempt at a puzzle / walking sim. The presentation is very good, visually quite polished. (apart from a few strange artefacts of the cryengine) I especially like the design of the shadow-puppet like projections, and the overall narrative is quite engaging. There are a few strange design choices that detract from the experience slightly, mainly the main item requiring constant refuelling, as well as an arbitrary slenderman-like encounters. which only left me asking 'why include this at all?' But perhaps worse was the way in which both mechanics exacerbate the issues with the already hopeless open-world navigation. I found a great deal of my time disoriented, fighting against the over-saturated lighting, or with the camera pointed into walls, crevices and bits of shelf as I searched for shards of glass or potions. Further to this, there's no journal or progress check or any way to mark when you have been somewhere or done something already, so the middle chapter was spent mostly walking around the circles. I was mainly kept going by some genuinely lovely set pieces, but the whole experience was pulled down by a few bad mechanics. Play if if you like worldbuilding, short stories and easy puzzles.

I got this game for a dollar and honestly can't recommend it for more than a few bucks. It is a long game but the achievements are a nightmare to complete. The game also has a lot of unused space that just seems to be there to make the space bigger. Puzzles are sorta basic but fun to solve. Performance is a complete mess. I get random freezes when doing certain actions requiring a complete closure of the game each time. There are also certain animations that are super poorly optimized, lagging out my beast of a computer despite not even being on the highest settings. I just can't recommend this game. If it is for a dollar, grab it for the sake of a time waster but it really isn't anything special.

puzzle normal not bad