This game is weird, which usually I would really enjoy. In this game though, it's weird in a really pretentious and boring way. The game itself is really pretty, and the setting is quite lovely. It's so peaceful and at times cryptic that I kept expecting something spooky to jump out at me, but it never did. I think the first two hours or so of gameplay are the most magical and exciting. Learning the basic mechanics and exploring the vast island were incredibly fun and engaging for me. The experience did go downhill, though.
This game really thinks that it has a lot to say about the meaning of life, but it really really doesn't. The setting wants you to explore and find hidden things, but often when you do you are rewarded with audio logs of a person reading a "meaningful" quote that can often go on for ages. Like, 3-7 minutes, with no indication of how long it will be before you start it. It absolutely destroyed the flow of gameplay for me, as sometimes I would stumble across one and stop to listen to it, only to find myself listening still, five minutes later, having forgotten what it was I was trying to do when I found it. This can be fine in some cases, but if you're pondering a puzzle when you find one it can completely interrupt your thought process. Coming back to listen to them later can be rough as well because they are often quite hidden or out of the way.
The puzzles are all interesting, and they intend for you to learn their mechanics through completing easy puzzles and slowly increasing the difficulty. This is fine in some cases, but there were a few areas where the puzzle mechanics were completely lost on me, even when I would leave and come back after a few days with a fresh mind. In these cases there is not much you can do other than brute forcing or keep coming back with fresh eyes if you don't want to look up a guide. it can be quite frustrating. I tried my best to play without any walkthroughs so I kept leaving and coming back to the puzzle areas that I didn't understand. This meant that the last chunk of the playthrough naturally became the most frustrating and unfun, because I was left struggling with nonsensical (to me) puzzles that I absolutely couldn't wrap my head around for the last few hours of the game. I finished the game feeling annoyed and unsatisfied after struggling with one of the puzzles in the final sequence of the game, which completely ruined any atmosphere built up.
I do think that this game overall does a good job of creating many different puzzle variants using the same base mechanic of using the grids, but the nonexistent guidance of the game can become frustrating when you feel like you've exhausted every solution or strategy to solving them. I often found myself having to retrace steps and re-explore areas over and over just to find one thing that I happened to miss on my first go-through of an area. This frustration absolutely detracts from the experience, and there was truly nothing more irritating than spending half an hour wandering and searching for some kind of small missed detail only to be met with a four minute audio log philosophizing about God. I really wish that you could pick up the audio logs and keep them in a notebook or something and listen to them at your own pace.
Overall the experience ended up feeling very tedious and frustrating, and the sheer volume of puzzles became somewhat exhausting. It would take many many hours to complete every single puzzle in the game, but a lot of that time comes from the kind of hidden puzzles that expect you to keep a left click going for almost an hour. I think maybe if you played an hour or two per day over a period of weeks or months, it would be a better experience, but I don't know how realistic it is.
I think that overall I would give this game a 4.5/10 that can be fun if you ignore certain aspects like the audio logs, but especially with the creator being a crazy pro-trump nut I think that I would give this game a pass.
