The Spectrum Retreat

It's a puzzle adventure that sprinkles a bit of philosophy into its narrative. It doesn't break new ground, and the pacing can feel sluggish at times, but there's a quiet simplicity to it—neat and unpretentious.

No checkpoints at 5 stage final puzzle. It represents several normal puzzIes in a row. In case you did something wrong you need to start all over from that first one (5-10 min repeating puzzles thatt you solved already). Don't even want to know what inside the head of designer who made this decition, I'm sure it is sad and spooky picture. Also want to mention female voice. Actress acts horrorbly, she overacts, constatly making sound like somebody strangulates her or she has covid in last stage. If fix problems above - the game would be al least not bad. It is very easy to ruin nice concept.

This game has too many soft locks that make you have to restart the puzzle. It's tedious, but didn't bother me too much until the last puzzle which is a longer one that has soft locks every step of the way. Its a puzzle game that punishes you for playing.

Plays like a worse version of Superliminal with the wake-puzzle-sleep routine. The story-line is irrelevant to the puzzles and plays out too slow and boring to be of any interest. Walk speed is less than half of what it should be. Overall very mild. Could've played into the horror a bit more. Hated the forced gender roles and the fakeout twist of the player potentially being a murderer, even though the wife was played as a villain for most of the story. Would've been better with just the puzzles, but those weren't that interesting or challenging either. Subtitles were good to add, but aren't formatted well - there needs to be a dark box behind them to make sure the white text stands out against the majority white backgrounds. There's too much text on screen at a time (I had to stop gameplay just to move the camera to a place where I could read the text), and the text doesn't flash disappear which makes it hard to tell when the text changes.

Started off in a cold hotel with no real direction, then after finding a random table and entering 1 code, it switched to a weird color puzzle game, that just got more and more difficult. Identity crisis. Horrible.

The Spectrum Retreat is a bizarre game that is quite uneven, and yet it’s somehow captivating. I will have to split the game into two parts: the exploring part and the puzzle part. Why the split? Let me try to explain it to you. Let me start with the puzzle part of the game. Puzzles are based on simple mechanics; you have a device that lets you use colors. They let you pass matching-color barriers and teleport. At some point, you will be introduced to room rotation, which will spice things up a little bit. In my opinion, puzzles are fun, and I liked that those puzzles were gradually getting harder. Yes, there is one section of the game that can be frustrating, and that is level 5. If you get stuck at that level, then you will have to press the restart button. It's a quite long level, so it may be frustrating and tedious. Let’s now talk about the exploration part of the game. You wake up in the hotel (I know, scary), and you have no context on who you are, where you are, and why there are some weird robots talking to you. You'll get a call from Cooper; she will tell you that you’re put here not by your will and that she will help you. At the beginning you may feel confused, so naturally you will try to unravel the mystery. You will realize that this game has a repeating-the-day motive. You will repeat the day and do the same thing, and then you go explore, and I feel that the game here is… uneven. Let me start with the positive side of this part of the game. Firstly, the atmosphere in this game is amazing. It sometimes feels like you are in a horror game, but this is not a horror game; it will never try to scare you, and it doesn’t have jump scares. It tries to make you feel uneasy, and every time I was walking around the hotel, it looked and felt like I was in the hotel from The Shining—especially the ballroom, which feels like it was inspired by The Shining. Every day, I was intrigued with the mystery behind the hotel, and I wanted to see more. Unfortunately, The Spectrum Retreat is not focused on exploring the hotel. Exploring sections are short, and it's more like a quick break from puzzles at times. There are some cool ideas with environmental storytelling, but it doesn’t use the full potential that I think this game has. Exploring feels tedious because your character is slow. You don’t have a sprint button, and I sometimes wish it had or that the character was a bit faster. The Spectrum Retreat slows you down, but I have yet to get an idea why it does it. It doesn’t build suspense; it sometimes ruins it. To be fair, even though I have written these negatives, I still didn’t regret it. Why? Let me answer it with one word: story. You have probably seen that some reviews tell you that the story is a bit of a letdown (especially the ending), and I disagree with it. In my opinion, the story of The Spectrum Retreat is intriguing and asks you certain philosophical questions about identity, memories, free will, and trauma. It’s not an easy task for me to talk about it without spoiling it much, so let me tell you this. When you’re in the puzzle rooms, there will be some weird, glitchy furniture with documents on them. Study them, listen to some memories, and when you are at the final choice, don’t think about the choice itself. Think about the idea behind the choices and how your character got to this moment. Maybe I’m overanalyzing stuff, but in my opinion this is a quite tragic game that tells us that the most scary thing is that we sometimes wake up and don’t know who we are. To be fair, puzzle sections feel a bit detached from the story. I understand the logic behind them, but it is quite confusing when at one moment you’re in an art deco hotel and then at the other moment you’re in a more futuristic room. I wish puzzle rooms were connected to the story, that they had some theme behind them (the glitchy furniture parts of the room were not enough for me). Only level 5 felt like it was connected to the story, and I wished there were more levels like that. I understand why people find the story quite mediocre or that it is not up to par with other games with this kind of motive, but I think otherwise. I think it's a clever philosophical game. Should you play it? I think you should try it, especially if it’s on sale. If you’re just looking for a good puzzle game, then this game will give you some decent puzzles. If you’re looking for an amazing story and want to unravel a mystery… then you should be ready that it may not meet your standards. It’s an uneven game in this aspect, and the ending can be quite anticlimactic, and you wish it gave you more context… on the other hand, I quite liked that it doesn't reveal some secrets. It lets you build your interpretation and theories.

Now you are thinking with colours

It is a decent enough first person puzzler to recommend playing, even though I have some nitpicks to its structure. Due to the nature of the puzzle elements, it is very easy to 'brick' yourself inside a puzzle without any indication, having to restart the whole puzzle. It's usually not a big deal, as the puzzles are pretty short, but the last puzzle of the game spans a few pretty big rooms with no checkpoints, so if you mess up with a puzzle piece, get stuck in the jumping physics or accidentally walk off the edge due to the floaty walking physics, you have to restart the whole thing again. Redoing what you just did is not a very satisfying experience. The endings kinda follow the same pattern - you have to redo the whole game over again to see the other ending and get the achievement for them [spoiler]despite the only relevant choice being at the very very end.[/spoiler] Yeah you can speedrun the game in about an hour when you know the puzzle solutions, but still, kind of annoying that you have to do that instead of just loading a checkpoint (the game deletes your save file after completion). Still, the puzzles are novel enough and the story, while pretty predictable and not very innovative, was interesting to follow. If you like first person puzzlers, you will enjoy this game.

From what little I got to play of the puzzles, they seem alright, but boy oh boy is everything surrounding them unpleasant. Bizarre, nauseating low-framerate feel to the graphics, even though it says it's performing well over acceptable FPS. No change at all even when turning the graphics down or trying what few tips I could find to fix this. This alone makes the game barely tolerable... But then there's also the forced walking sections in between chunks of puzzles. Man, these are bad. You're wandering around these identical hallways, and for some reason your speed is capped to lower than when you're doing puzzles, and then you've got the woman talking in your ear non-stop, repeatedly telling you you need to go to so and so new location. This gets old REAL quick when the hotel hallways look so much the same and you can get turned around easily, and she just keeps reminding you over and over like every 20 seconds HEY YOU NEED TO GO HERE and you KNOW, but you physically CANNOT move any faster and don't know where this room is. Already makes a bad impression right off the bat with the first walking section, where she first starts talking to you and says "go to the elevator". I remembered exactly where the elevator was and headed directly for it, but since the speed is capped so much I still got to hear her remind me HEY GO TO THE ELEVATOR at least 3 more times while I was walking directly to the elevator as fast as physically possible. Then right after that she tells you "now look for a door that looks different than the other hotel room doors"...ok sure, the doors have these geometric symbols on them, so surely I'm looking for one with a symbol different than the rest right? Nope...after wandering around finding nothing, she then says "actually what I meant was a door with something different looking NEXT TO IT"...ok...why didn't you say that the first time, but whatever...off we go looking for that door. Turns out that what you were looking for was a door with a big keypad next to it, which is very easy to spot once you find the right hallway its in, but it's just like...why would you not just say that? Just say "the door with the keypad". They try to handwave this constant vagueness away with some BS about how they can't reveal too much of your memory to you too fast, but wtf does something like a door with a keypad next to it have to do with that? I'm gonna get traumatized because I remember this door has a keypad next to it so you have to tell me about the door in the most deliberately obtuse way possible? It's just badly contrived and stupid and between this and the framerate headache it's not worth bothering with.

This is a pretty difficult game to beat, tbh. I don't know the people who says it is "easy" -- are you trolling or something? This is not easy, it requires high IQ to make it fast. Personally, I take +22% than the average to beat.