Giants

You’re tasked with investigating an apartment building, talking to the residents, and taking photos of anything that might be relevant to your case. As the elevator mirror subtly suggests, you don’t have a reflection, which hints that you might actually be invisible. That idea is reinforced by the fact that you can walk into people's apartments and the tenants barely acknowledge your presence. The game is all about presentation and atmosphere. There are no puzzles to solve or challenging situations to overcome. You simply wander through the hallways, enter apartments, rummage through whatever you can find, and then move on to the next one. The residents are all anthropomorphic animals, but they rarely say much. What little dialogue there is can be difficult to understand because there are no subtitles. Most of the time, they just wander around or perform simple everyday activities. One thing I found a bit frustrating was the interaction cursor. Nothing in the environment is highlighted, there are no visual hints, and the game doesn't give you any objectives. To discover what you can interact with, you have to get close to objects and carefully move the square cursor in the center of the screen over them to see if it changes. The problem is that the cursor changes rather slowly, and by the time it reacts, you've often already moved past the interaction point. It means you have to scan almost everything at a painfully slow pace. Some interactions are obvious. Every apartment has drawers you can open, and they usually contain something unique to that resident. Others are more obscure and sometimes require an item to activate. Since the game never gives you objectives, whether you discover these interactions is entirely up to your curiosity. In one apartment, for example, there's a crib mobile that's missing a piece. The missing part can be found somewhere in the same apartment. The only clue that you're supposed to do something with it is that the cursor changes when you hover over the mobile, even though pressing the interaction button does nothing. I didn't think that was enough of a hint because plenty of other objects also change the cursor without leading to anything meaningful. You explore a single floor with several apartments, but in the end, none of your actions really matter. The game concludes as soon as you enter a certain apartment and witness a disturbing scene, something you can reach within just a few minutes. Afterward, it shows a handful of the photos you took with your camera before abruptly closing to the desktop. Overall, it feels much more like a short interactive visual experience than an actual game. There are achievements listed as well, but they appear to be broken.

Fantastic atmosphere. Have to play it again to figure out what really happened here...

Es gibt viel zu entdecken in den urigen Wohnungen dieser kuriosen Bewohner. Viele kleine Details, die mich in einer skurrilen Atmosphäre zum Schmunzeln gebracht haben.

SPOILER WARNING: This game had me very curious and intrigued. I wandered between the apartments, perusing every drawer and solving every puzzle. Almost got 100%. The slow growing of the fleshy substance added another layer of weirdness. But, I must say. I really wonder why Pidge hung himself. Is it canon? Also, I was not sure what to do with the diamonds and water pistol that I found. Any suggestions? This game is a BARGAIN!

The art direction is gorgeous!

Giants is the kind of game that doesn’t have a specific goal, it’s the exploration and journey that it focuses on. It won't tell you what you need to do, so you discover things at your own pace. The atmosphere is pretty heavy, but unless you’re a scaredy cat like me, nothing will frighten you aside from the look of the residents of the building you’re investigating. There are puzzles throughout the rooms, but they are entirely optional as they unlock achievements, but the actual purpose of the game is more just walking around and taking in the setting and getting a glimpse into how the residents live. The ending felt abrupt, I’m not really sure what the reasoning behind that is, but I still enjoyed my time with the game. I've been struggling to get one of the achievements, but the rest were easy enough! King of the slugs/10.