I do not remember how I encountered this game but I liked it a lot. In Mirum, you play as a human (I guess) trapped in the eponymous miniature world along with other people. It is not clear how or why you ended up there but one thing is clear: you cannot die. In fact, every time you are killed, you respawn in the main city of MIrum. I found it clever that the game takes a common videogame concept and turns it into an existential question. Mirum's citizens are divided into two camps, the pro-immortality Priests, who want to stay in Mirum and worship its creator, and the anti-immortality Seekers, who want to escape and live a mortal life. There is more background on the world scattered around the game's levels, which is neither presented perfectly nor I understood it fully, but I greatly appreciated the creator's effort to provide it, as well as his obvious zeal for the story.
So, how will you escape Mirum? With some trekking, some magical artifacts.. and solving puzzles of course! There is no clear explanation for the in-game appearance of the puzzles but they are fun and the main reason to play Mirum. Mirum is a first person puzzle game and its puzzles are mostly logic-based, like finding the correct number in a sequence, essentially brain-teasers. In some levels, they come at you in procession, one after the other, while in others, they are scattered around the map, which adds some exploration to the experience. I saw in the comments that some people found the puzzles hard. I thought they were logical but you can stumble easily if you miss a detail [spoiler](at some point I spent a lot of time roaming the highlands for no reason as it turned out).[/spoiler]
Overall, Mirum is a fun if a little unpolished game that made a stronger impression than I would have expected. More than the puzzles, I think that his is due to the game's mysterious atmosphere. The convoluted story, the cryptic comments from the NPCs, and some striking music pieces help in this regard.[spoiler]When I first encountered the skeletons in the Sewers, I grew restless with the prospect of fighting them since the player had no weapon. However, Mirum has no fights. The level played like a bizzare walking simulator with puzzles.[/spoiler] If Mirum was made by a single developer, as I understood, then this is very impressive!
