Neyyah

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.

I have about 15 hours into this game now and regretfully I'm going to give it a thumbs-down. I wish there was something in-between a positive and negative rating, as I'm sure this game would be enjoyable to a certain segment of the gaming world. The game tries to be like Myst or Riven in look-and-feel but lacks the cohesiveness and grace those games had. There's a tediousness to the game that (at least for me) developed with time. Between the complex story and the numerous areas to journey to, for me it got to the point where it felt like I was just running from location to location to do things so things in other locations would happen, so it stopped being enjoyable.

This just didn't click for me. I loved the old Myst and Riven games back in the day, but I don't think this style of game really holds up well. I feel like they could have at least went for the bubble nodes instead of the slideshow. Especially frustrating where the constant long video transitions, especially when interacting with a screen. Why does every tablet or computer screen in the game need to play an identical animation when both entering and exiting it? In addition, I found the acting hokey and the writing to be overly expository. The names especially were a little ridiculous. Good writing makes a fictional language feel lived in. This writing does not. Finally, the world itself. It's just kind of bland. Everything all looks the same and despite being an alleged love letter to Myst and Riven, Neyyah lacks color. Nothing pops.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.