Neyyah

Does it feel like a secret long lost Cyan title? Almost. Sound design is is exquisite, music and ambience is so good it made people ask me what I was playing. The graphical style is similarly striking; people kept asking me what I was playing when I had it hooked up to my TV. Are the puzzles as good as a Cyan game? Honestly, I would say so. Riven had some pretty obtuse puzzles and hidden paths. Neyyah stumped me but then made me feel good about solving. I think that's all I'm looking for in a Cyan-like game. Being stumped in a beautiful, slightly creepy world, so I really think Neyyah nailed it. If you love Myst games really just play this, I have put this in my "Cyan" category in my Steam library, where it sits proudly beside Riven, Myst IV and Obduction. It is definitely in the same league, but only just... Sadly, the backstory and setting were handled poorly. In all the Myst games I would scrabble for a journal whenever I found one, and delight in it making the world make a bit more sense. This was especially good in Riven, where Atrus, Catherine and Gehn's journals all gave not only more explanation of the world, but also 3 different perspectives on the events of Riven. They were also emotionally engaging, I remember feeling more than a pang of pity for the objectively evil Gehn as he lamented the loss of his father, wife, child and people. Feeling pity for the villain of the piece? Now THAT'S writing. The journals in Neyyah are, however, boring, dense, largely unhelpful, overnumerous, unengaing and verbose. I still don't really know what was going on in Neyyah, whereas the political and environmental crises of Riven are still clear in my mind 40 years later. Neyyah absolutely assaults you with made up words for made up creatures, places and people at such a huge volume it is impossible to be engaged. "My friend, the boodlebrox caves of zorobrapta reminded me so much of our hunting trips to Raztalla, where we stalked the fearsome Grazletong"....it's like...ok? But I'm not engaged? So I don't care about this made up stuff? The journals were a real chore in Neyyah, which I was forced to read over and over again in-order to find clues to puzzles. The one journal I did like was that of a soldier close to the end. This was the one journal that was voice acted (and voice acted well) and I enjoyed it. The prose and voice acting were authentic and engaging, and they were talking about something I could visualize, so I enjoyed it. I don't think there were any clues to any puzzles in the soldier's journal, however, so the whole journal experience was very disjointed and nowhere near as elegant as that of Riven or Myst IV. This weakness carried on through the overwhelming volume of fictional names as well. Atrus, Gehn, the Whark, they all sound authentic, though are made up fantastical names. Neyyah's names all sound like mixture of oven cleaner and laxative brands. Smollax, Nylaxium, Velitron... The literal name, "Riven", is genius. Riven means to tear apart or break into pieces, and Riven Island is literally being riven apart, and Atrus and Catherine have too been ripped apart. The word is a real world but is not used as a noun, and so even if you don't know its meaning, it's still punchy, angled, bold, memorable and enthralling. (What exactly has been riven apart? Play the game to find out!) The literal name "Neyyah" is just bleh. There's no wordplay or layers, it's just constanants thrown together. I even forgot the name, so when I wanted to play Neyyah I literally had to google "Myst clone newly released" and luckily Neyyah was in the results. This is not to say the setting is bad. I think the setting of Neyyah is potentially very good, but the information was not disseminated well. The payeta mechanic was also very odd. You're given them all at the start, and can't transfer them to different machines so they're never really used in an intelligent way. You're given 30 keys and have to put them in 30 locks, why? Just seems pointless. It has to be said that this game took 1 man 8 years to make. It is an outstanding achievement. It is a passion project, a love letter to Myst and the games of yesteryear. Defy Reality indeed, Reality being that gaming is a creatively bankrupt, literally bankrupt, corporate, soulless industry. I am deeply thankful Neyyah exists and enjoyed it immensely. The atmosphere, which many would say is harder to capture than good writing, was impeccable. I will support future Defy Reality Entertainment projects in this vein without question. I might even start to find the journals in a future game weirdly charming, if I go in not expecting a thriller like Riven and rather a fugue-like wander through a dreamlike world. In a future game I would like an even harder setting where we have to draw our own maps. I would like less, but better quality journals. The cyan atmosphere has been captured. 38 hours to complete, no cheats, hardest settings. A phenomenal game.

I am not happy to leave a negative review, because i really really wanted to like it but the game is just not good gameplay-wise. What the game gets right is the myst exile/riven like atmosphere with beautiful environments so there were moments where you really enjoy going through the world of Neyyah. This brings me to the first negative, and that is: despite the game's HUGE size, the animations are extremely limited and there is no free look. It is a handful of static scenes with animations performed only during some button presses or when elevator is running. Not a huge issue, did not affect the atmosphere too negatively but considering that this is a 30GB+ game from 2025 it is surprising. But the real issue is the actual gameplay. Majority of "puzzles" are just about pressing buttons at very different places in some sequence, with occasional number / character combination puzzles that are hidden inside tons of notes burried deep inside uninteresting lore text. The difficulty of the game lies in 3d pixel hunting, skimming through tons of text for code combinations and having to backtrack the world one thousand million times because the map layout is really illogical and random, made into a maze-like structure on purpose for introducing difficulty through a very tedious and bothersome way. The order and logic behind having to press button X after event Y also make little sense, it's not as if you felt some kind of of accomplishment after solving an actual puzzle as you progress further into the game. There was a glimpse of hope for an interesting puzzle regarding decoding the language, but it all turned out very primitive and the reward for uncovering it was almost zero, you did not use the language through the game where it was displayed at all and got this decoding tool later anyways. What was at least a bit was using the number system in one of those code combination puzzles. Considering the lore, it is just too much. The narration absolutely fails to deliver the story interestingly. You can feel the developers put a huge time into creating a vast time and backstory and got so caught up in the complex world that they as if they didn't realize that person coming to play this game has 0 knowledge of this lore an failed at the actual execution of the narration. You are left to wonder the world with occasional note here and there where once in a while you hit some lab or other "information hub" where the game dumps a HUGE amount of notebooks and books ALL AT ONCE you have to grind though before going back into the game. And the quality of writing is also very naive, it's not as if you read an interesting book. You are just hoping you are finally going to end reading the uninteresting notes absolutely littered with new jargon like "frezalta" or "jalood". The game was meant to about self discovery of this novel jargon and the game world but it just did not achieve this. The exploration is reduced to walking around and then having to read walls of text. It's a real shame that so much effort and a beautifully rendered world was undermined by very poor storytelling execution and "puzzle" design.

- Sometimes this feels like a find-the-object game, because you have to find a tiny part of the screen you can interact with among a bunch of red herrings. - Several times the game will present you with a bunch of objects that appear identical, then hide some small difference in one of them which you're required to find in order to progress. This means you have to exhaustively repeat the same process over and over again or you'll miss things. This is tedious. - Sometimes the locations you can move to feel like they're slightly off from where you're trying to go, so the end result is that you get disoriented really easily. This is especially bad in places where several directions look nearly identical. - There is way too much stuff to read through all at once, and it's not at all clear which books/letters give you important clues and which ones are just world-building. These really should have been spaced out better, or delivered in small pieces rather than giving you an entire library to read through all at once (like the Lab HQ). There is also just a huge amount of proper nouns to learn, and a lot of them are very similar. I admire what the developers were going for here, and I really wanted to like this game. But I just found myself getting frustrated all the time. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Myst, but it's important to recognize that Myst had flaws. This game doesn't attempt to fix any of those flaws, so it ends up also suffering from them. And for the love of god, add a volume slider for the sound effects. This game just BLASTS my headphones every time I start it, and sometimes I want to be able to listen to music while quietly playing the game.

I mean...It's fantastic. It's basically Riven on a slight budget. It's done by a handful of people who put a lot of love into it. It's beautiful, it's nostalgic, it's challenging - sometimes annoyingly so. A solid 8.5/10 for me. If you love the old school Myst/Riven type games, this will bring you back there for many many hours. The renders were very nice and there were tons of them! The animations weren't half bad either! Only negative for me is the hefty amount of reading. There were more than a few times when I knew I had to go back and find some information in a journal that I knew I had read (but didn't know it was important at the time). And I had about 12 journals to choose from, 15-20 pages each, some of which were in my inventory, and some of which were scattered very far apart from each other across Neyyah. And there were a LOT of alien terms that had to be deciphered among them, so even though you're reading the journals, you may not be understanding the lingo. Imagine being forced to read books in foreign languages at different libraries across the city to find a single sentence in English and you'll get a good idea of how it felt. But if you're someone who enjoys the journey and not the destination, this won't bother you too much. Everything else really made up for the negative bits. In the end, I loved it. Definitely worth a play and huge kudos to the team for making this beauty.

An incredible achievement from a one-man video game company. But be warned: this other worldly 'Myst' like fantasy is extremely complex and difficult. Nearly everyone will need guidance and help to complete the journey - but it comes with great satisfaction if you persivere and reach the end of possibly the best video game to be created in Australia.

we really looked forward to this, but when we started playing it fell flat. There a LOT of written notes with a HUGE number of crazy names. We play casually, not intensively and immersively, and completely lost track of who was who and who mattered. The point-and-click pre-rendered views let the author put in lots of detail and control the colour rendering etc, but the click-turn makes it too easy to lose orientation - especially at 3- or 5-way nodes. Marts of the world a bright and attractive, but too much is industrial grime - and its *samey* grime - repeated textures. Ugh! So no, we didn't get far. We couldn't carry on playing it the way we'd hoped. The way we'd played Myst & Riven, and on.

Excellent puzzle game! If you're a fan of games like Myst and Quern I highly recommend this very well made game. Had me teasing out its secrets for well over twenty hours.

This game takes me back to Myst/Riven days! Somehow Neyyah's scale combined the majesty of those games into it. The OST is absolutely gorgeous, music that I can and have listened to over and over again. I watched a full video walkthrough of the game but playing it myself blew my mind even more than the walkthrough. This game demands to be seen and played on the biggest screen you have! Get lost in the beautiful world and let the music and the scenes carry you away---getting lost is one of Neyyah's hidden treasures! The acting is amazing. It is truly a game you can escape to for a while when you are having a stressful day. The game is lore heavy--almost to an excessive level, the creator clearly spent his time crafting the world, its people and the lore behind it. It was a seven year journey to to the creation of Neyyah and we are all the better for it! Neyyah is a powerful and rich masterpiece of incredible beauty and I can't wait to play it over and over again! The creator clearly poured so much heart and soul into this game and it really is evident. I cannot praise this game enough--it feels like you are really there! I cannot see what Defy Reality Entertainment creates next. I just know that Neyyah and it's remarkable beauty will truly stand the test of time alongside Myst and Riven that cam before it

A wonderful hommage to Riven and Cyan The tone and pace are perfect, a feeling of being lost and mesmerized, but balanced enough to be able to go on. What I loved about it is that so many tried to replicate the mood and poetry of Myst, or the esoteric anxiety from the dark hallways of Age V, but this game just nails it. The puzzles are tricky enough to make you feel you're figuring the island out, but not too perverted to avoid the madness of the golden dome, with fast travel and optional hint systems that help keep the journey comfortable and up to date. Let's hope this brings newcomers and Cyan fans together, it's a beautiful game made with love and playing it was a delight

Das Spiel hat eine schöne Grafik, entspannende Musik mit einer guten Melodien, echte Schauspieler (anders als im Remake zu Riven), die Rätsel machen Spaß, eine dichte Atmosphäre und eine gut ausgearbeitete Story. Ich kann das Spiel voll und ganz empfehlen, ist für jeden etwas dabei, der Point & Click Adventures aus der Egoperspektive mag. Ich spiele jetzt seit 13 Stunden und komme gut voran (wie das immer so ist bei solchen Spielen, ein paar Stunden steckt man an einer Stelle fest, dann kommt einem eine Idee und manchmal zündet die). Ich kann nur empfehlen die höchsten der 3 Schwierigkeitsgrade auszuwählen, also ohne Hilfen, dann hat man das volle Myst-Feeling. Ich hoffe diese Entwicklerfirma sammelt mit dem Spiel viel Geld ein, damit sie noch mehr von solchen Spielen rausbringt, ich finde es super.