[b] Disclaimer: The game was offered for free by the developer through Curator Connect. [/b]
I'll be honest here: At first, I didn't want to review this game as I recently have gotten lots of weird/bad games through the curator connect and I thought this might be one of them. But then I remembered that I had a lot of wrong ideas about games like Bleed and Momodora and ended up loving them. There was a chance that this title was actually able to surprise me. So I accepted the offer and what I found, I wasn't expecting. If you want detailed explanation of my experience, continue reading or skip to the end for a brief conclusion in form of a TLDR.
The main idea of the game is that you have multiple characters to control in separate areas and each character controls the behavior of the character which is in front of them. For example, if you want to move the character in the third area, you have to use the first character to control the character in the second room and get him to control the third character. Then you have to continue doing this to get to the fifth character and ultimately finish the game. This kind of gameplay is unexpected and innovative, but it paves the way for complication and ultimately places itself next to the game's issues.
This complication arises from how you control the characters. This is not a problem at first and you can easily manage it. But when you progress in the game, controlling and positioning the characters becomes a nightmare; because in addition to the complicated controls, you have to make sure that your character is facing a button in order to use it. So, when you later find out that you forgot to press up to make the character face the button before attempting to press it, and you have to go through the whole process of positioning them again... it's just irritating & disheartening rather than being challenging & fun. What makes this worse is the fact that the last two characters do not have clearly understandable designs and you can easily mess up.
The second issue is that not just the gameplay itself, but everything else is so confusing. The game does not give any kind of information to you. So, it's not clear how you should start to play, how to progress in the game & complete it or even exit from it. Even when you get to the end and think it's all over, you find out that you have to do more to finish it; but you don't know what to do. At this point, you just need one simple mistake or a bit of frustration to lose all hope and abandon the game; which will happen sooner or later and leads us to the third issue.
The third issue is that there are no saves. Every time you open the game, a brand new challenge is offered to you and all the progress from the last playthrough is lost. This actually helps with the replayability of the game, but it eliminates the progression as well. Just imagine when you leave the game to give yourself a rest or do something important and then come back for more, just to see that all your progress in gone and you have to do it from the beginning. It's disheartening, isn't it?
I commend the developer's efforts to create a unique title. They have created something that has a unique feature to separate itself from other titles. But the problem here is that the game is so vague and also complex to control, that it's really hard to have fun with. And when you cannot have fun with a game, you cannot enjoy playing it.
[h1] TL;DR [/h1]
reYal uses an unexpected idea to form the gameplay. But unfortunately, it's too vague & confusing and the controls become overly complex later in the game, making it nearly impossible to have fun with.
