Chromatic Isle

Chromatic Isle is a very short, free game with a handful of exercises in matching sounds and visual clues. Although some puzzle objectives are not initially clear, they are easily solved once you understand what is required. The game can be completed in less than an hour. The environment is divided into four colorful areas, each corresponding to a season of the year. An area consists of a single ‘room’ and one or more variations on a unique puzzle type. You should earn all achievements if you complete Chromatic Isle and spend a few extra minutes playing with the puzzle interfaces. I recommend this game to those who want a brief interlude and are comfortable with sound-based conundrums. [quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32732116-IndieGems/]Follow [b]IndieGems[/b] if you enjoyed this review and want to see more like it.[/url][/quote]

"Chromatic Isle" is a short (~30 minute) low poly first person adventure/puzzle game. It's not terrible, I've seen so much worse on Steam. It's also not exactly great. It is sincerely made and that's a huge plus. This features fairly low quality low poly 3D visuals which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and it's clear the developers behind this didn't understand that. Resolution and controls are locked, in fact there's basically no quality settings, so there's no way to improve the mediocre visuals. This is only free in a rudimentary sense... the developer has their hand out for a "donation" for this as you're expected to buy some extra soundtrack DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 8 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.