Havsala: Into the Soul Palace

The art is gorgeous. It makes you feel very sophisticated and deep, right up until the moment you realize you’ve been clicking on a vase for ten minutes hoping it’s a secret button. Unlike games where you just pull a lever, Havsala requires you to comb through diaries, scrolls, and ancient texts to find specific dates, symbols, or astronomical data needed to unlock the next area. I haven’t read this much since I accidentally opened the Terms and Conditions for a software update. If you like history, culture, and geometry, you’re in heaven. If you just want to click things until they explode, you are in the wrong place.

Игра не оправдала ожиданий, которые сложились у меня на основе скриншотов на странице игры в магазине, и в неё неинтересно играть. Дано много текста и много научной информации без всякого предисловия. В игре одна комната с предметами, не все из которых можно перемещать, непонятно, есть ли в игре сюжет и для чего вообще эта игра, если она заявлена как игра-головоломка с отсылкой к историческим реалиям. Когда читаешь текст про Пифагора, его учение и последователей, тексты про календари, думаешь, что это будет как-то обыграно, но оно никак не обыграно. Игра сделана в стиле тыкни туда-сюда, сам догадайся, что разработчики от тебя хотели. Полное разочарование.

This game first lost me at the abysmal opening narration. "I am the sexiest sexy woman and I love being sexy for men, but I'm also a supergenius who has studied everything and I will now list for you every -ology word the writers know, and also I'm going to keep repeating these facts over and over and over." It was bad fanfic. It reminded me of Phantom of Manhattan actually, in that way that a character can't just be special by virtue of being the protagonist, they have to be the specialest special to ever special. (Also, there's this weird vibe that like, they felt like they had to justify a woman protagonist being smart by emphasizing that don't worry, she's also super hot and sexually available? It was kind of weird.) The second and third time it lost me was the bigger problem: the game is full of grammatical errors, misspellings, and broken English. It was at times incomprehensible, and what of it I saw I saw largely because I know how these games are supposed to work and could suss out puzzles and gameplay mechanics. I progressed in spite of the fact that the text was nigh incomprehensible, against the game's worst efforts. I tried to play this game on three separate occasions and each time just found decoding the writing to be so exhausting and irritating I ended up quitting. At a certain point a game with this little polish and effort put into basic proofreading just ceases to be worth my time.

I really loved the story, the visuals, and the music. I never got bored while solving the puzzles.

Çoooooook beğendim, inanılmaz hoşuma gitti. Spritüel havası, felsefe, geometri, kozmoloji, zaten ilgimi çeken konular bu oyuna da tema olarak mükemmmel bir tat katmış. Bulunduğumuz odanın tasarımları, genel olarak oyunun çizimleri, bulmacaları her şeyiyle inanılmaz bir oyun. Yapanların ellerine sağlık gerçekten çok güzel bir şaheser koymuşlar ortaya. Devamını bekliyorum inşallah bu tarz oyunlardan daha fazla yaparlar.

This game is absolutely one of my favourites. I love mythology, mysticism, spirituality and things similar to that. And it is unfortunately extremely rare to come across a game where these elements are integrated accurately. However, this game manages to achieve that. If you're a pagan, you would absolutely love this game. It is mainly an information based puzzle game. There aren't any misinformation, at least non that I noticed. There are things I haven't heard of and researched thanks to the books in this game, so I'm really grateful. The puzzles are really entertaining. It is also really nice to know more about women that were burried in the past. The drawings are absolutely stunning. It is very detailed, which makes this experience even more magickal. While playing, I couldn't help but yearn for a room like this and that is the only bad thing I can say lol

Comfy little puzzle game, solid intermediate difficulty for puzzle game lovers (vibes like The Room but in shorter and more story) I would not recommend it for a beginner that just wants an easy short game, as some of the puzzles require a way of thinking that does not come easy to someone that isn't used to these kinds of games