Clouded

[h1]Video (gameplay + commentary):[/h1] https://youtu.be/dVo6VhG8xIo [h1]Summary:[/h1] Neat but brief point and click puzzle game. Like the movie Memento, you don't remember your own life and have to piece the story together through discovery and searching your own house. A unique concept in the game is that your character loses consciousness after 5 minutes and you can take notes in-game by writing on your arm with a Sharpie. Presumably the idea is that you would then be able to refer to your notes once you've woken up again, though we've learned that what you write on your arm when you pass out isn't always the same thing that appears on your arm when you wake up. We're not quite sure why, but usually the notes on your arm are changed to correspond with whatever you've unlocked so far in the game, so to that end it's still a helpful guide. It's a neat mechanic and it'd be super cool to see it used with greater purpose. Most of the puzzles in the game involve trying to figure out how to unlock some of the locked doors in your house. The puzzles are generally logical and can be solved after staring at each one for some time. Graphically the game is simple, but it works. The music is super pleasant. As mentioned, the game is quite brief and if you're committed to solving all the puzzles in one sitting, you can probably finish the game in 10-20 minutes. Overall we liked it and simply wish there was more of it. We'd love to see other scenarios or concepts that use the "black out and write stuff on your body to figure it out" idea. We found it worth it for a couple bucks.

You can't actually finish the game anymore. It's a really interesting idea, however the game will freeze when you restart the day or even if you try to finish the game once you know everything. The notes system seems to work by connecting to an internet service to submit your note and to retrieve a random player's note, however that service is long since gone and the game doesn't account for that. You can still play the game up to the last puzzle, but you need to restart the game every time you run out of time, and you won't be able to see the ending because it freezes trying to send your note to the server before displaying. It's honestly a bit sad because I did think it's a good concept but it was just never updated to be offline before the server went away. Since you have to watch a video to see the ending anyway, you might as well just watch it and skip playing the game.

So I found Clouded by browsing through the All Upcoming Games tab on steam. Which is a bit hard to find since nowadays if you go looking for upcoming games, it shows you Popular Upcoming Games first, which is a great way to filter out a lot of the crap that Steam sells, but it does occasionally mean some good games slip under the radar. I wasn't sure if this game was going to be any good, but I stuck it on my wishlist anyway because it dared to try something new. You play as a man who wakes up outside his house with no memory of how he got there, with notes written on your arm. According to the writing, you have five minutes to get to your basement. After five minutes you wake up outside again, but the writing on your arm is different now? So yeah, I thought, that's an interesting enough premise. A couple of days after it came out I checked the reviews and saw it had zero reviews. Which made me a bit sad, thinking this game is going to be completely overlooked. It was cheap and on sale so I bought it with the conviction that I was gonna at least give this game one review, hopefully a positive one, to help spread the message about it. But...I can't really do that. After playing this game for half an hour the conclusion I've come to is that this is not ready to be a commercial product. I mean, art is art, and this is art, but this feels more like portfolio work? For starters, there's no starting screen, no menu, no options, no way to quit the game without alt-tabbing and closing the game manually. It's also very short, which is generally not a deal-breaker for me, but again, this feels more like a proof-of-concept than a complete game. Not that I finished it, and here's the big problem: why I couldn't finish it. You spend your time trying to solve puzzles in this game, mostly by finding and deciphering cryptic notes. But many of the notes, as well as the reminders written on your arm, are “handwritten” (which means written with a mouse in some kinda basic paint program) and they're actually indecipherable, unreadable. I mean, I like a messy, handwritten aesthetic, but you can't let form trump function, and when your secret codes can't be read, yeah, you're crossed that line. From what I played of the game though, I think I'd still feel disappointed paying for it even if it didn't have that hurdle, and I had been able to finish it. Because again, it doesn't feel like a commercial product, it feels like an experiment, a practice run. Developer, if you're reading this, as a starting out project, this is great, and I hope you keep it up. But I do think trying to sell this on steam was a misstep. Maybe stick it up on itch.io for free just to show it off. But what do I know? I'm just an opinionated consumer. I absolutely do think artists deserve to be paid for their work. But if you take your half-finished practice paintings to market, you can't really expect people to buy them.

So, I spent a good 20 minutes on my first play through trying to figure it out. It seemed like good fun, but I couldn't get anywhere with it. I was just confused. I really liked how different things appeared on your arm, but what you write yourself vanishes (or at least it did for me), which makes it a little useless. If you're big into puzzle games, this is a short puzzle that you might enjoy. I fired it up again, and looked at my arm. The code was there and the game was over in ~4 seconds. I did enjoy trying to figure things out, but there are a couple of issues with it, including the fact there is no way to quit without tabbing out of the game. Nice ending, pretty simple to play. Just point and click.

Keep re-living the same 5 minutes, over and over. Trying to remember all the puzzles, but someone changes what you wrote on your arm. Neat idea, cool story puzzle adventure. https://youtu.be/0InpLemFjjI

It's fine - complete, but short. One unfortunate aspect is that the main mechanic in the game no longer functions, at least for me. The initial implementation seems to be that when one writes on their arm, only other players get what you wrote and you only get what they wrote. Think of it like the "Try Jumping" notes you receive in a Souls game. However, since the game doesn't have an active community, no messages are coming through and neither do you see your own notes on the arm. Either that, or else my NAT filter is preventing the network traffic from coming through. Either way, when you remove the arm writing mechanic, you have a simple, Sierra-like point and click adventure with a few puzzles. For the price, it's fine, but the ending is a bit abrupt.

The game is crazy short. I'd suggest drinking with some friends and have them play it... the drawing on the arm mechanic will probably lead to some fun. Also the briefcase can glitch sometimes and the bars disappear just leave the room and re-enter.

I think the idea behind the game is awesome, but the game is too short, I beat it in 16 minutes, the Dev should go higher in the idea and increase everything in the game to make it better and worth it. The idea is simple: Every day you lose your memory, you wake up outside a house without knowing what did happened before, but you know what's write in your arm. Every day you have to search for a clues and hints to know what's the code to the basement is. Once you find this code, you enter the basement and you beat the game, you see what's going in with the of the game and you learn about it's plot. Some problems with this game is the amount of stuff in the game: There's a few objects you can inspect in the whole house. There's only one house with 3 floors. There's a few rooms you can search on. (and some are useless) There's only one puzzle in the game that doesn't require you to think, just trial and error. At the end, it's a good idea in a bad game, it's like that move "Memento", but too poor and short. I saw Demos of other games take more time than this full release game. I don't think the Dev should sell that on Steam, but put it for free, or at least release more chapters of it.