Rituals is a weird little adventure game, where you're plunged into an eerie world during late office hours.
Story:
You play as an unnamed person, who is working in their office late at night, you're heading out back home, but the elevator didn't send you to the ground floor, but instead a mystical world where you quickly find out that your actions will have a big impact.
Rituals is pretty light on story, with a good majority of it being delivered to you by notes scattered around the world. What's there is decent, albeit you can easily get confused because missing a note is pretty easy and not to mention the major jumps in locations could make anyone confused.
Graphics:
Albeit very simplistic, Rituals is very pleasing to look at. It has this very low poly look and I absolutely loved exploring the environments, especially the jungle with a small village for you to explore. There's a good majority of environments you visit through the entire game like forests, jungles, graveyards and underground bunkers.
I will say most environments don't have a lot of stuff to interact with, you will often find plenty of rooms, where there's no items, notes or anything of interest for you to look at. The simplistic nature does hurt it a bit, but not by a lot considering it's very easy for you to find items, so you will never be pixel hunting.
Audio:
There's not much audio design to speak of, you could would probably think the entire game is on mute. There is some ambience in each location, which is decent, but there's not much of it. In my opinion the worst aspect of the game since I would really like some music to accompany me while I'm exploring and solving puzzles.
Gameplay:
Rituals is a point and click adventure game, you look for items, explore environments and solve puzzles. The exploration is up first because I have quite a bit to say. When I first played Rituals, I thought that the game was a mobile port, because you click on the screen and then while holding the button rotate the screen to see all of it and click on arrows that are stuck on the ground to move to the other screen. When I found out that it wasn't a mobile game, I was quite baffled by this design decision as it's honestly quite janky and sometimes really annoying to use. It's not terrible, but I would have rather have the game be a fully 3D world you explore by walking around instead of the scheme they went with. The world is definitely built that way, so I don't know why they went with this.
The puzzles are overall rather simplistic and nothing incredibly difficult. It mostly consists of puzzles where you require to find an item and bring to a location to progress. It's mostly really easy stuff, where the biggest challenge comes to exploration considering in a few levels you end up in maze like environments. Since there's not many items scattered around to throw you off, you will find your way through pretty quickly.
The game also has two endings for you to get, so there's some replay value for it, but since the game stays the same in your second playthrough, you will likely breeze through it very quickly.
Verdict:
It took me roughly 45 minutes to finish Rituals and honestly I had a great time with it. It's nothing incredibly special, but it does do what it sets out to do incredibly well. The world is varied and designed very well and the puzzles even though simplistic are incredibly fun to solve. If you like the genre, I definitely suggest checking it out.
Final Rating:
7.5/10
Pros:
+ Plenty of different environments
+ Interesting story
+ Good puzzles
Cons:
- Most environments are pretty empty
- Movement system is really annoying
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