Strange Antiquities

Terribly dull and cheaply made.

Great game with a good story. Not too simple, not too hard. Definitely recommend it.

I'm at the beginning of what I suppose is the last day of the game now. I began the game with as careful and as thoughtful of a completionist mindset as possible, and have still only barely gotten half of the achievements. Something to note is that the hint system only helps with the customer or puzzle right in front of you at the time. It gets you closer to the answer when you're about to go insane with failure after failure. Otherwise outside of this mode, the hint system just essentially chastises you for not reading up when you're not "in the thick of it". I greatly disliked having to go online for *lots* of 'nudges', for fear of missing out and/or soft-locking myself. Which is something worthy of discussion in-and-of itself. Sometimes you're supposed to reuse stuff, other times when it *could* still be appropriate to reuse an item, you take a massive hit. This becomes more and more of a problem as the number of items you get becomes fairly massive over time. Oftentimes, due to the limited number of days to do everything, you feel like you'll get locked out of other stuff if you don't scramble before closing up shop because of straggling clues left over. The hint system sure isn't going to help you not get locked out of things however, because it only cares when you're panicking to solve a customer or location puzzle directly in front of you. I shouldn't feel any sort of way about the hint system of a game, but this game *forces* you to feel bad about it, and correspondingly yourself for both your "need" to use it, and the futile let-down once you do. Don't get me wrong, the hint system doesn't cuss you out or whatever, but if it was going to be like this it would actually be funnier if it did (lol). Sometimes the end-of-day clues are so obtuse and deliberately misleading that you're only going to solve it if you luck out and change perspective "the right way". Some of them feel downright mean, akin to how game devs of the 80s/90s would just take out their frustrations on the player, but a little subtler. The game must expect you to take alternating branches in subsequent play-throughs to get all achievements. I mean, when it's literally just choosing one item over another at a single moment in time to traverse to the different branch, idk.. The misses are much more demoralizing than the successes are at releasing happy chems (lol). When I miss the first time, I just start clicking hint and throwing items at it. I don't feel any intrinsic sense of *wanting* to learn from my mistakes, like I don't get "more curious" or whatever. I've beaten Strange Horticulture, and in that game I eventually felt like I wanted to quickly get through it to get to Strange Antiquities, because I was hoping that I'd get some quality-of-life improvements from the newer game's system. Now that I've complained this whole time, I do want to say that the entire concept of thaumaturgy is super-duper intriguing! Despite my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I did learn a LOT about at least the concepts behind it, because the way the info is presented is probably the clearest I've seen in a game thus far. Fields, symbology, gemology, these are things which I felt I didn't really "learn" about in games like Myst and the Zork series, but always wanted to gain something of a deeper understanding. There's definitely a nice, spooky sense of immersion as well. I do very much like the ambiance, and it's particularly rewarding to "do a day" when it's dark 'n stormy outside! I wish I didn't feel like I was content to (eventually) simply brute-force through days, caring less and less about continuing as I kept missing. I genuinely do have a pretty good ability to focus on things in games: pay attention to details, remember key facts, not need to go online for clues, etc. I also did still get most items right on the first try as well. This *is* my genre of game without a doubt! If there were a LOT more days than there is, I think I also would've liked this game more in fact. It's not that it was overstaying its welcome, the days scarcity which you can clearly see in front of you the whole time you play makes each day feel "overly important" (if that makes any sense), and so you eventually feel anxious enough to seek elsewhere for info all the time to ensure you're not f'd. I probably would have had a better opinion of it if I'd not played Strange Horticulture first. Also I would've actually preferred to have my Steam rating for Strange Antiquities set as 'neutral'. Since it's so unique I opted for 'recommended' so that others who're into this very niche genre don't miss out on a worthwhile game. Because at the end of the day it *is* worthwhile for others to go through and likely glean a better impression of it than I did.