EMUUROM

I want to like this game so much, it's right up my street. But my god is it unfun to traverse, just feeling lost all the time and relying on janky physics. Having a map that shows room connections but those connections can only be reached by entering rooms from a certain part of a different room, renders the map useless and just causes more frustration when you spend however long trying to reach a place only to find the connection is behind a wall that requires entry from some other route you also have no idea how to reach. I tried my best but I don't think I'll revisit this game.

Commits the cardinal sin of Metroidbrainias: It's not finished. You will solve hours and hours of obscure puzzles and frustrating, finicky platforming challenges, chasing down red herrings and loose ends, and your ultimate reward is a screen that says 'not yet'. It's like if Animal Well, after collecting all the rabbits, led you to a screen that said "sorry guys I ran out of time, I'll put something cool here eventually I promise."

It's a good game that I sadly cannot recommend. I'll remain vague to avoid spoilers, though I will briefly talk about one feature of the game in general terms. The game seems to genuinely have a lot of nice ideas and is really cool to explore initially, but eventually you reach a point where that fades and all ur left with is the more negative aspects. Those being for example that the game is very high friction. Figuring out solutions is difficult, as is executing them, making experimentation and trying different ideas or attemption to confirm/deny theories one might have about the game incredibly tedious. Because of this, to me the game often didn't feel like I had overcome a challenge but rather that I either 1) beat my head against a wall long enough to finally crack through it 2) completely randomly stumbled into something and a solution just "happening" to me rather than me achieving it. More than once I wasn't sure if what I did was an intended solution or a bug/weird behaviour of the game. This also isn't helped by the game being quite janky, making some of the platforming segments a slog to get through. It felt like this game was a rage game in disguise at times. Emuurom comes with a challenge of deciphering an old language, which I'm always a fan of in games. It makes things a bit more difficult by not being simply "english but with different letters", which is also cool and makes players work a bit more instead of potentially being able to easily solve all the translations fairly early on. However, the way this additional layer of abstraction works doesn't make things feel any more rewarding and just adds a lot of uncertainty because you end up getting cryptic hints int a cryptic language and now you can't even be sure if they've been translated correctly. It's a neat idea that is poorly executed, which is how I would describe all of the game. I do see some genuine potential and really cool ideas behind a lot of the things the game does, but the way they're actually implemented just fall flat on their nose for me an aren't fun to engage with at all. I do have almost 70 hours in the game because I was hoping that maybe the bad parts are just a bit of a low phase of the game, and that eventually things would get better and the payoff would make it all worth it, but that moment never came. So in conclusion, maybe do try the game, maybe it'll be more enjoyable to you. But if you do notice it starts to feel more like an annoying and that you have to fight the game itself at every corner, don't hold out hope, it won't get any better from there and you might as well quit then.

I was really conflicted about whether to give this game a negative or positive review, but I unfortunately am not recommending it. Uncovering the deep secrets and puzzles is awesome and there is a ridiculous amount of stuff to discover and that is all fun. My main gripe that really dragged down the game for me is just how difficult navigating the world is. Every room is filled with secret walls and tunnels that you can walk through but have to scan or physically touch to see. This would be fine for maybe a small amount of rooms but every single room has them and it's so frustrating and tiring to keep track of how how each room is actually laid out since what you see is incorrect. Then a good chunk of the rooms can only be accessed from a very specific way sometimes not even from an adjacent room. If you need to go to a specific room it very well could be a long trek just remembering how to get there. Sometimes you might be going to that room and miss a jump in a platforming section and get sent back 4 screens. You can try and use the map but it's practically useless since so many of the room connections it shows can only be accessed from a cut off portion of the room. I've played the game 24 hours now but I probably spent at least 7-8 of those hours just figuring out how to get back to a room that should not be that difficult to get to. I didn't hate this game. I am probably going to be playing it a bit more trying to uncover more of the secrets and decode stuff. But I really can't recommend it because of how frustrating basic world navigation is.

One of the most delicately designed games I've ever seen, in a scale very few match. It's a game that's very hard to describe for others, but in a way that kinda makes it a bit more special for me. Still, for any and all puzzle game lovers, this is such an easy recommendation that I'm sure will blow your mind many dozens of times. It's also made in a really cool, open source engine that treats the game kind of like a retro game, which fits really well with the graphics and OST. Really banging OST by the way, that chiptune goes crazy hard. The only unfortunate blemish is that this game cannot ever be 100% on Steam, as there are two mutually exclusive achievements in the game, and getting one removes the other. Completely baffling choice, but I won't let that lower my enjoyment of the game.

It's finicky, but those hidden depths go really deep. I enjoyed it more the deeper I went and was sad when it was over*.

The game mentions other games it took inspiration from in the credits. Strangely enough I haven't found FEZ in that list, despite me finding these two games similar. Both are puzzle platformers divided in screens, both have mysterious language, secret fly mechanics, multiple endings built on top of each other, even development time exceeds 5 years for both. In FEZ I liked the atmosphere , both sound and visual design. EMUUROM is much more simple, but it has deeper puzzles and cool mechanics, for example using save and reset, expect growing playtime. Some reviewers mentioned poor controls, and FEZ has kinda the same problem. Good puzzle game

This game is 3.93 [i]megabytes[/i] and has over 40 hours of content. That alone is INSANE. An absolutely fantastic puzzle game from a very talented solo developer. Borb has made an enthralling world that gets an incredible amount of mileage for a game that only uses two buttons to interact with the world around you. It's a game with incredible amounts of depth. I almost gave up and refunded after getting lost pretty early on, and I am SO glad I stuck with it. There were so many "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥" moments where I discovered something fundamental that changed everything. Just when you think you've seen everything, you stumble into a sauna and realize you're not even halfway done just [i]scratching the surface[/i] of this masterpiece. Every single tool and every single ability is given to you from the get-go, it's just up to you to discover these tools and learn how to use them. It's very similar to games like the Outer Wilds, where there is no real meta-progression that you'd see in a traditional metroidvania. You don't get a special jump as a reward for completing a quest, you just get informed that you've literally always had one, you just never noticed! That's not an exaggeration either. I had already used the special jump by accident hours before I learned it existed! I just did it by accident and didn't notice what I had done until told about it, and only then did pieces fall into place.

Very well crafted puzzles

Brilliant game, works perfectly on steam deck. I am a bit stuck, i thought i was close to being finished, but Not Yet.