Recursive Ruin

I really enjoyed this game, but I'm aware that this is the kind of game that some will love and others will hate. I think this is the reason that the review score isn’t the highest, and giving it’s score, I did go into this with lower expectations, which definitely could have contributed to my enjoyment of the game. What drew me into this game was it’s whacky, kind of bizarre visuals and there being comparisons made to some of my favourite games of this genre. I read reviews that compared it to Manifold Garden, Antichamber and Superliminal and essentially that was me sold already. I love games that are more on the surreal side, and lean more on environmental/critical thinking puzzles opposed to pure logic puzzles. I was also getting the sense that this game, in a lack of better words, was arty and pretentious. Personally, I love arty, love the vast possibilities that comes with that and I think maybe I’m just a little bit of an art snob in my own way. I’m someone who loves going to art museums. Do I know what’s going on half the time? No! But I mean, look at all the stuff, isn’t that neat? I tend to not take arty stuff very seriously and just go with the flow of whatever is going on. I enjoy the idea that people choose to express themselves in bizarre and confusing ways and when something seems unique to me I'm more likely to want to engage with it. This brings me to the story and narration. To quickly mention the narration, I did consider this kind of bad in a very particular way. Have you ever listened to an audiobook and the voice actor is kind of purposely putting on voices to represent different characters? This game was very much giving audiobook level voice acting. Regarding the story, I don’t think this is the games strong point. I take notes as I go when playing games I plan on reviewing and most of my notes for this game regarding the story were just confused questions, then at the end just “ah, not as ambiguous as I was expecting”. The story was a little confusing, and waffled on a bit (which I didn’t really mind). I felt like there was perhaps a lot of symbolism, parallels or context that maybe just went completely over my head. A good example of this is at the end of the game being able to see a book called “Sioraiocht” (god in Irish) among your things. Did this game have things inspired by Irish culture? Who knows! Not me. I understand what the story culminated to, but I did not find it particularly impactful and didn’t feel like I pieced much together along the way. If many people who played this felt like this, I can 100% understand why people would just label this as “pretentious” and call it a day. Nonetheless, I found the imagery and set pieces in this game intriguing and visually interesting. The otherworldly, godly figures of incomprehensible realms you see in this game were just so interesting to me. There were times in which I resigned myself to just not fully understanding it, as at times it almost felt intentional. The way some characters speak to you it’s like there is a background precedence that they know you’re just a mortal of another realm, so obviously you wouldn’t understand them. I had flashes of remembering the characters in “The Good Place”, Angels in the afterlife, explaining something to a human and then being like “why am I even trying to explain this, it’s beyond you”, the way that show used language to make you [i]feel[/i] as if it was incomprehensible was something I really admired. Maybe in this instance, if that is what they were trying to do with this game, they kind of missed the mark a little? To talk more of the games stronger points, I will start with the puzzles. I wouldn’t say the puzzles in this game are particularly challenging, but rather that they are on the satisfying side. You have two mechanics, “shrink”, which is self explanatory, as you can shrink or grow your character on command, or “shift the world”, making the kaleidoscopic environment around you expand or retract, switching up the environment. The main shifting mechanic was extremely trippy at first, and honestly if you get motion sickness easy you may find this quite unsettling. Personally I really enjoyed this mechanic, I loved the way that you need to think about the space due to the repeating architecture. At first I found myself walking around, as if I was not just walking an infinitely repeating road. You need to think about how you exist in one instance of that environment, but it is copied over and over again on either side of you. When you have a goal, if it is currently inaccessible within the copy you stand in, you need to consider if you can interact with one of the other copies to reach your goal. This game had the kind of mind-bending critical thinking puzzles that I just really enjoyed. This game also has some really amazing environments. There were plenty of times in which I just stopped and stared, or walked mindlessly for a bit. Some of the landscapes were so cool and aesthetically pleasing that just taking it in for a bit made my brain happy. I would try and discern where the boundaries of the maps were, at what point they were starting to repeat and in what ways. There was a few I genuinely couldn’t comprehend how it worked as the environments are not always infinitely repeating. It was fun to wander and just stare at these wonderfully curated worlds. This went hand-in-hand nicely with the music being quite nice. It’s a kind of odd electronic type of music I'm too old to accurately fit into a genre, but I found it really added to the overall ambiance of the game. As far as first-person puzzle games go, this one was more relaxing than most. I played this on Steam deck, and ended up remapping the keys. It’s easy to do, but if you can’t be arsed I have shared the layout that I used when I played. Overall, I found this to be an immensely interesting game. It’s trippy, very surreal, and I'd honestly say that if you are a fan of the genre it should be something you at least try out for yourself. [quote][b]Achievements:[/b] Included Easy, complete the game and watch the credits. [/quote] [quote]For more reviews of this genre, check out my curator page [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45518898-The-Best-First-Person-Puzzle-Games/] The Best: First-Person Puzzle Games[/url][/quote]

I liked the puzzles, but everything else was obtuse and intentionally edgy. It made enjoying the puzzles much more difficult because the esoteric characters were interspersed throughout, frequently pulling me out of the thing I'd bought into. Maybe the fact I beat SOMA immediately before playing this has put an unfair comparison in my head, but I can't honestly say that any of the heavier themes in Recursive Ruin are handled with tact. Crack cocaine!!! This is one I'd rather have a "Not really" button for whether I'd recommend or not. No feels too negative, yes feels too positive, but I am overall more neg on the game. Even the a-ha moments were underwhelming. [Mild spoiler if you care] One of the final "dialogues" in the game has a character from earlier exclaim "I finally understand!" and my literal response was, out loud, "I'm glad one of us does!"

Puzzles and Aesthetic are really cool, but the story and writing ruin it for me.

Interesting concept, but rapidly gets tedious.

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the puzzles were pretty good but i felt a few levels were lacking just a bit, the story was ok but it was portrayed in the most boring way ever, some of the levels felt like i was placed inside a walking sim, if you like puzzle games you will like this as long as you have a little bit of patience to sit through the boring bits which there are quite a lot of. I Rate it 6.7/10

Only have this because it came in a bundle and I can't refund it without losing the whole bundle. Thought the puzzle concepts might be interesting, but never got far into them because I was thoroughly turned off of the game by basically all of the art direction. I'm not one to harp on graphics most of the time, but the environments in this game are downright ugly. On top of this, there are gen ai assets, slapped-in npc's repeating the same animation that isn't designed to be looped, and that specific type of cringy writing where most of the dialogue is completely meaningless and the rest of it seems to think it carries emotional weight that simply isn't there. It feels like someone wanted to make an asset flip and then forgot what they were doing and made a bunch of actual puzzles, but never brought everything else up to snuff.

While the game does warn about sensitivity issues for some players, I managed to stomach other games just fine, some with even more motion sickness etc than the average person can handle. This however was just too much for my current sensitivity towards visual patterns. Then there's odd reflections and some z-fighting, so the game is not finished! But the devs are sadly done with their updates for over 3 years now, so this is it. I might watch a playthrough of it because the puzzles are mostly intriguing. I say mostly because at some point, the usual pattern to move forward was broken, maybe it was supposed to be an alternate path, who knows. But also a part of the reset/teleport floor did not act like the rest. And there were some other spots that magically teleported me and I did not understand why, but they did not feel like part of the usual puzzles. Visually, it's just not clear what is a... I wanna say portal? (idk what they are) And what is not a portal. But random surfaces, whether horizontal or vertical, cannot just transport you randomly. It needs to do a better job teaching the player. And story rich is indeed story rich. Not only there's a story for the recursive universe, there's a story outside that universe. I think just one of the 2 would have sufficed.