What looked promising at the beginning turned out to be a let down.
The game is somewhat reminiscent of the Cyan games, and I was hopeful. My sense of exploration has taken a beating.
After 36 hours playing (no, “working” is a better word…) this game, this is a thumbs down.
The game is fraught with mistakes, instabilities, quirks you name it.
For example, there are flashes everywhere (e.g., blue sky) when you move and turn,
Things (puzzles) simply did not work; I tested these as I had nine games going at the same time. They worked in some and not in others. What was consistent is that it was never the same thing that did not work in the different games; so, I got to about ¾ of the game in total, with nine games going! Frustrating…
Puzzles were not necessarily hard but more like based on pure luck and highly improbable. For example, take the opening word puzzle. I had 3 crossword programs going and I could at best get 1-2 perhaps 3 words figured out. In the dictionary, these were often obscure, never used words before. Probability-wise, it was very low that you would find these even if you knew from the programs all of the combinations possible. So, this was a red-herring puzzle meant for you to initially fail and enter the game getting 1 point no matter what you did. Very disappointing and a display of a lack of game savvy – bizarre thinking at best.
Another example is the “ball under the three cups” type puzzle. You got the first one (maybe) and the others, three more, were pure luck. To render things to the absurd stage, on the third trial, a clown pops out screaming at you so that you loose track of the ball, which of course you previously had no idea where it was in the first place. These choices were pure guesses and had nothing to do with the players abilities, which is lame programming…
I started to do some probability counts pressing a button and recorded the outcome to see if there was pattern I could follow. These types of things are built on some sort of algorithm, and in some cases, this helped out get past these obscure chance puzzles.
For example, the puzzle with the marbles in a vertical column (the long one) was inconsistent and haphazard. You do a pattern, it fails, you do it again, it succeeds (a different pattern appears), then fails, succeeds and so on until you finally land on the correct one by chance, no logic involved. Just wait for the right pattern to show up again (lots of time wasted here) and embark in it and the puzzle may be solved.
I often fell into limbo. Limbo is behind the main scene of game. At first, I thought it was part of the game as you can walk around and do things. Limbo is for example behind the castle, or walking in the horizon on the hills, on the lake, behind the steel doors on paths, etc. Looking at the Discussion, I found a command the Developer gave i.e., “XSRP and Enter” which I used continuously to get back to what they call “a safe place”! So here I am in Limbo trying to make headway in the game and I’m actually stuck behind the scenes. In several games, the XSRP command brought you to an area close by to the Limbo entry point that you could explore but were confined to and hence had to restart the game from the beginning all the same. Sigh…
Other points that need improvement: Manoeuvering in this game is awful, you cannot save your game (which could have saved a lot of headaches), the pictures have a limit (need to erase some to add others; so I used my screenshot instead), the beginning or intro is out of place and should be edited or removed, music comes on when you solve a puzzle and progress which you want to turn off because it sounds like you are in a “Mario” game, need I go on?
The last example I want to share is the cave and chemistry labs where you make different shapes (cylinders, spheres, cubes, cones) of different colors. I understood the concept quite well and was able to do most of the shapes and colors (different in every game). I even calculated the permutations possible and did them all. I could not proceed though because the dome would not raise eventhough I had done the correct shapes and associated colors. There are mistakes with what the developer calls Basic, Advanced, Experienced, Master and Supreme shapes in the correct lab. So, the dome would not open, and again I overcame it, and you guess it, fell into Limbo. No matter what I tried the game was stuck. I got all the points though…
Bottom line, in my view, the quality control and testing for the game were minimally, or simply not done. Perhaps the developer counted on buyers in 2018 to do their job, quicky got overwhelmed and gave up. This Guiney pig is exhausted. Hence, I am waiting to buy the Firmament by Cyan as I read there are technical issues to be fixed.
