The Initiate

This is exactly my style puzzle/escape game. Some puzzles difficult and some easy but all doable. Looking forward to more.

This reminded me a lot of old school point-and-click escape games. I don't think it quite reaches the difficulty of one like Submachine 10, but there are a lot of puzzles all going on at once, so it's definitely up there in complexity! I had a ton of fun. I think the only critiques I have are that the sound you make when you jump is very silly, and sometimes the physics make it difficult to move around in some areas. Other than that, phenomenal game!

Enjoying the puzzles so far, tricky, but have used no spoilers (6/24 achieves)

[h1]LEGAL E DESAFIADOR[/h1] Jogo com uma temática boa com um pouco de trama. Os desafios são bem elaborados e alguns exigem uma atenção a detalhes bem minuciosos para progredir. Os contras ficam apenas por alguns bugs, como itens coletados e usados que retornam aos seus lugares e alguns polígonos que se transformam dependendo da posição câmera. Mas de resto o game funcionou bem. Recomendo para aqueles que gostam de pensar e resolver enigmas.

Nifty indie escape room scene. It's well put together and logical for the most part. Actually using a notepad to jot stuff down helped a lot as you move around. Plenty of backtracking which might turn some people off. Only one underground scene/part was really tedious (but was thankfully short enough not to ruin the game). Few clipping issues here or there, but nothing super buggy. Can be finished in a few hours, but felt like the right amount of content to keep it interesting during its playtime. Hidden gem.

2/10 Groucho Marx: “I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.” Me: “I wouldn't want to be an initiate to a cult that would put me through The Initiate as initiation.” If you're versed in ancient PC games, you might pick up The 7th Guest vibes: wandering a (less-haunted) puzzle house while an antagonistic voice equal parts roots for and against your success. Unlike that game's discrete logic puzzles, The Initiate relies on the connected fluidity of an escape room. The puzzles are fine. Too many missable, pixel-hunting items and overly straightforward data collection/direction following. But if it were IRL, it'd be a kick-ass escape room. The sound design is so bad it's a distraction. I'm 90% sure opening doors produces the exact AOL Instant Messenger "friend sign-on" MIDI. For those too young to know what that means, trust me, it was a sick burn. The plot is also terrible, but mercifully sparse and meaningless enough to ignore. But the worst part of an already bad experience is the bugs. Saving and restarting can cause previously found items to reappear as infinitely collectible duplicates. Worse still, even if you have the patience to bear The Initiate's shortcomings, you may, through no fault of your own, reach a broken game state that simply can't be completed. This is antithetical to the very philosophy of puzzle games. To have to refer to a walkthrough to discover that the item needed to progress literally doesn't exist is a frustration I wouldn't wish on my enemies. Except my worst enemies, who now are the developers of this game.

This game is awesome. The puzzles are incredibly well made. It's very engaging, and the story, although not deep, gives your journey a bit of purpose; that combined with a glados-esque (albeit human) narrator that sarcastically comments on your progress and is also tied into the story, makes for a fun and interesting playthrough. The game also has many after-game puzzles (ARG) which are very challenging (and I have yet to solve many of them). Those are primarily based as an ARG type of game, although a couple of things are still left to be done within the game itself. In any case, if you like puzzle-games, you'll probably love this one (and if you've played games like the guest, this one surpasses most of them in many aspects). It is also quite polished (I've read some reviews that said otherwise, but bear in mind that many updates have happened since then). Some items can respawn, but that's about it. However, when I made my last playthrough (for the speedrun achievement), I noticed that, after I finished it, I hadn't saved for a while, and when I got back to tackle some of the aftergame puzzles, I noticed that I wouldn't be able to win it from that save if I wanted to, because a bug prevents me from opening a cabinet that has something I need. I don't really need to finish it yet again, since I already have every achievement, and the aftergame puzzles don't require reaching the end either, but if this bug had happened to me on my first playthrough, it probably would have bothered me. In any case, there's a way to alter the save game through windows registry, which seems easy enough, and would work to solve this need be (or you could play the game again, since once you know the solution to the puzzles, you can get through it really fast). I advice you to save often, but just in case: [spoiler] keep the pieces of the map in your inventory until you have all three, and after you grab the last statue, make sure to place it before quitting the game, and save before doing so, otherwise it can vanish from your inventory, and you wouldn't be able to reopen the place where it is hidden [/spoiler]. Safe for that, the game is really really cool, and I totally recommend it.