The Sojourn

A meditative puzzle brewed from geometry, philosophy, and light.

i need yall to know. i finished this game OUT OF SPITE. concept? 10/10 novelty in puzzles? 10/10 storyline? eh its there, some message about growing up and learning about the real world and being the change you want to be, etc etc. generic, but cute HOWEVER. this game def should have gone through a few more beta testers. you cannot sprint, there is no use for the jump button, and the puzzle solutions are finicky. The difficulty of the puzzles range from disgustingly easy (no thoughts brain empty, even at some of the later stages) to RUN RUN oh you need to angle yourself the right way aaaaaand u just fell off the stage.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with The Sojourn, but it's also flawed in many ways. Some reviews are talking about very tight frame-windows, but that just isn't the case anywhere in the game, unless you try to cheese puzzles. + Breathtaking Visuals + Clever Puzzles + Beautiful Soundtrack - No Run Button -> this game is extremely slow and a lot of puzzles require backtracking - While the puzzles are good, the variety just isn't there and it gets repetitive pretty early on - Way too long for the lack of variety - Lots of cheese - Some Softlocks force you to restart the current puzzle, very annoying especially in combination with the slow walking speed This would be a much better game if it was only half as long as it is, but it's also not so bad that it deserves a negative review. I'm excited to see what this studio makes next.

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I had to look up the word Sojourn one day and stumbled upon this game. It's a good puzzle game. The mechanics are introduced gradually and intuitevely, before a new mechanic is introduced you have already mastered the ones that came before. A lot of merit puzzles posed quite the challenge and it was exhilarating to solve them. Not gonna lie, the game felt a little tedious at times. Despite the 11 hour play time it took me several years to complete the game. I would boot it up from time to time to challenge myself intellectually, but after a few puzzles I would get off the game and not touch it for a while. Long-winded puzzles that require a lot of time to actually perform the solution were very rare, which is a massive W in my book. However, the lack of a running button still added to the annoyance when I had to reset a puzzle and redo everything from scratch. In the background a story is told throught statues with themes of knowledge and the virtue of thinking for oneself. I thought the art was beautiful and the little quotes that you get for solving merit puzzles really elevated the atmosphere. Good game.

A nice puzzle game. Beautiful graphics. A lot quite abstract in nature. Does what good puzzle games should do - leaves you to find for yourself how the mechanics work without a too-heavy helping hand. There IS a story - but it's another thing that isn't given to you on a plate. I'm only half way through now and I've got some theories but that's all they are - theories. The only niggle I have with the game is that there are puzzles where you're going to have to try lots of different things to find the solution. And every time you have to do that you usually have to go right to the start of that puzzle. An "undo" feature would have been nice. But it's not a game killer! I did manage to 100% this one. So all the little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ were just that and by the end I could avoid most of the backtracking as I got more used to how the puzzles usually work. I missed some of the "scroll" puzzles but (MINOR SPOILER ALERT!!!) there's an opportunity to complete all of them just before the end sequence.

Do not hurry. A couple of riddles every evening will be enough.

枯燥乏味

I'm only partway through, but my initial impressions are that this game is wonderful. It's great to get away from the over complicated nature of today's games, with battle passes and limited time events and inventories with 1500 items, having to go out and grind for gear, and sit there forced to listen to (or read) NPCs talking to each other for hours. This game brings back the simplicity of games I haven't seen in a while. You have basically two core concepts: following the mostly textless, symbolic journey of life, and solving short puzzles in each area to advance to the next. (I appreciate that I'm not forcefully paused to read/click through a bunch of conversations before getting back to actually playing. It's mostly just statues or animations as you're walking by, that tell a story.) This game is beautiful. I love the art style (which is the main reason I bought it) and effects and level / environment design. The sound design and music are really good too. There's something really pleasant about even the sounds of the level forming together out of crumbled material when you first walk into it. The puzzles so far have been satisfying as well, with a good progression from introductory/basic sample levels introducing a new concept, to subsequent levels building on those concepts and getting a little harder each time to keep you interested. (I've gone through around 22 puzzles so far and 6 bonus puzzles.) There is an area with two optional bonus puzzles that you can walk past, and I wish the game told you if you could go back and do these later even if you skip them. I'm not sure if you can, but that was the first thing I looked for before continuing. Based on a forum post it sounds like you may be able to after finishing the game. Also of note, this game doesn't mention anything about VR support, but automatically launches SteamVR when you run it. You can disable that by adding -nohmd to the launch options. Or you can try what seems like kind of an automatic built-into-the-engine vr headset support by adding -vr to the launch options. It looks pretty with the headset, but you can't see any of the menus (you have to navigate them blind by checking how to navigate them in flatscreen mode first), and any of the instruction text on screen which explains new puzzle concepts, is far off to the top left so you can't really see it in your headset or on your screen if you have vr mode enabled. It also doesn't support VR controllers. So the hidden VR mode isn't functional enough to work for your first playthrough. Maybe if you wanted to play through it a second time after figuring out all the concepts. It does work with a gamepad, which is nice.

Interesting puzzles, a decent addition to the 'first person puzzler' genre, but something about it just makes me bored playing after only 20-30 minutes, so I have to play it in smaller chunks. Maybe it's the slow movement speed and the inability to sprint (which is required for the puzzles to work), or the sterile environment with story notes so vague they might as well not be there. Regardless, the puzzles are quite clever and include optional difficulties, which are quite fun to tackle. It's not as strong as The Talos Principle series or the Portal series, but it's good enough to play and recommend.