Tobla - Divine Path

This is a tentative thumbs-up from me from the assumption my experience with this game was just me and won’t be like that for everyone. I honestly shot myself in the foot a little bit with this one as I really wanted to like it and the rating maybe made my expectation for it higher than it should have been. This is in no way a bad game, but it definitely didn’t click for me personally, and by the end I was actually just frustrated and tense for a few different reasons. It started off pretty great, the game is immediately very pretty, utilising that bright and simplistic graphical style that I feel like The Witness made more popular. The music and general sounds are also quite nice (even if as an English person I can’t hear a wood pigeon sound without fixating on it because of a meme I saw ages ago of someone skanking to a wood pigeon noise with the caption: “Everyone in the UK has heard this absolute banger”). The narrator kicked in, and honestly I was pleasantly surprised. Whenever I see the tags “Narration” and “Comedy” on a game I often assume it’s going to be cringe more than anything. The voice acting is actually fairly decent. I would not go as far as to say this game is “funny” though, and the [i]script[/i] is another issue I'll mention soon, but generally at this point the game seemed positive. Once the story got going, you learn you’ve been chosen by some kind of deity to… test… puzzles? It is a pretty weak premise in all honesty. With the parallels between “testing puzzles” and a female non-human personality guiding you, the game essentially just felt like a Portal re-skin up until the point you unlock your main puzzle mechanic, a “swapping” spell. I thought you’d unlock more spells as you go, but it’s actually just the one. This mechanic does at least help the game feel like more of its own thing despite the narrative doing it no favours. Our narrator follows the same “I’m smarter than you and I'm in control here” trope, which generally I thought was fine, but the narrative did get a little tired pretty quickly for me. The script isn’t the best, there was a lot of “say something slightly worrying”-pause-”big sigh”-”make another point” that I noticed really quickly which just made it feel too pre-written (if that makes any sense? It didn’t feel natural). Because of that, the character then didn’t feel very fleshed out and felt kind of hollow. There isn’t really enough substance to them to make them a good character. Writing this review I have only just noticed that in the trailer the narrator is French. Perhaps the narration is much better in what I assume is the devs native language. I feel like even in English she should have been French? A pretentious French goddess who thinks they’re better than you and talks to you like you’re a stinky mortal could have been pretty good… (is that some English stereotyping of the French coming through? French people, I know we say we hate each other but I need you to know I love you really). I do give the devs a bit of grace, as I think they had issues with development and essentially had to cut the scope and just do the best they could. Regardless, it’s worth mentioning that if you want to play this game, don’t hope for a great narrative, just focus on the puzzles. The puzzles themselves I think were decent, I think for me they just didn’t really click. The game didn’t flow very well for me, which was a bit frustrating as I was hoping this was going to be a short and relaxing portal-esque game. There are times generally with games that it feels like the puzzles are just bad, but this didn’t necessarily feel like one of those times, it felt instead that it may have just been me being braindead. That said though, I did get incredibly stuck on the penultimate puzzle. Everything to that point wasn’t necessarily that challenging, so it baffled me that suddenly I was faced with a puzzle I just couldn’t solve. I knew what I was supposed to do, but I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. I basically cheated my way through that puzzle. [spoiler]I started climbing stuff, gaslighting myself in thinking that if I had a higher vantage point, my brain would have an epiphany and it’d figure it out. Well, I got high enough that I basically set things up and leaped to the end.[/spoiler] I solved it in a very unintended way. I was just so frustrated and baffled at this point I didn’t really care how I proceeded. Checking the discussions afterwards, I was really amused to see that someone else did exactly the same thing. This did make me question if it really was just me being dumb or if the puzzles are a little disjointed, but honestly I still veer on the side of it being me (and that one other person). Getting past that and thinking that that was likely the end of my problems (gaslighting myself again that everything after that was going to be completely fine and fun), the final level just vexed me a bit. [spoiler]The “boss fight” includes a part that you need to use momentum to fling objects, and despite doing it,[/spoiler] the physics of the game just wasn’t doing it consistently, so it took me an irritatingly long time to complete the final level. This might not have been so annoying, if it wasn’t for the fact that the final level is seemingly set-up to be fast-paced. If there is a chase scene in a game, ideally it’s curated in a way that you can get through it first-time but still [i]feel[/i] like it was a close one. Failing a chase scene usually just breaks the immersion of the game and starts to feel frustrating, and that is basically how the final level felt for me. It was just made extra frustrating that it felt like it was the physics that were failing me. Overall I think this game has potential for you, but for me I just finished the game a bit annoyed. I was expecting a calm pretty little puzzle game, and ended it feeling lowkey dumb and frustrated which was quite a disappointment to me. Usually, I can forgive a poor narrative pretty easily in first-person puzzle games as long as I enjoy the puzzles, but I can’t say that I did so although I don’t believe this game is anywhere near bad enough to warrant a down-vote, I do think it should be taken with a pinch of salt. My advice would be to lower your expectations, and then play it, as I feel like you’ll enjoy it more that way. [quote][b]Achievements:[/b] Included Easy 100% as long as you can finish the game as there is a chapter select[/quote] [quote]For more reviews of this genre, check out my curator page [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45518898-The-Best-First-Person-Puzzle-Games/] The Best: First-Person Puzzle Games[/url][/quote]

To give context for the following, note that I played about 90 minutes in total and reached puzzle #6 before deciding the rest wasn't worth my time even with a guide. Literally just a significantly worse Portal knockoff, which I really should have caught onto when they all but admit in the game description that it does not contain any original ideas... and also does not contain portals. The only mechanical addition is swapping physics objects' positions, with puzzles constructed around limitations like some objects not being manually movable or not being able to tag objects for swapping between rooms. Aesthetically it's fine but bland. The controls are fine enough, though non-remappable and the non-changeable controller calibration is Not Great. The two glaring problems here are: 1. Tobla herself. Clearly inspired by GLaDOS, Tobla is openly antagonistic and makes a lot of jokes at the player character's expense. The trouble with this is that the magic sauce for GLaDOS is her status as a master manipulator and gut-bustingly hilarious commentator, and Tobla is at best uninteresting and unfunny. In as far as I played I spotted exactly one thing that qualified as a "joke" and her insults were hovering around the same level of milquetoast. 2. The puzzles. For a puzzle game the puzzles are astonishingly unpolished. This is especially glaring since so many of them revolve around physics interactions that are difficult to manage or simply involve non-obvious options as opposed to options for which it is not obvious how to use them. The worst part of this as far as I reached in the game was dealing with spheres, since it seemed like the game wanted the player to immediately understand that momentum is preserved between object swaps but failed to tutorialize that concept in any way. This results in puzzles with lots of fiddly, fast-paced swapping and moving of objects to precise positions where a solution that seems like it should be close enough to work (because there is no clear correct placement for objects) fails when a ball gently bounces off or rolls away from a slope it needs to surpass. To summarize, it's not fun, it's not original, the puzzles are bad, and the antagonistic narrator possesses neither comedic or manipulative wit. Save your money and just play Portal instead.

Did you play 'The Talos Principle'? This is the 'The Talos Principle' from Wish That's all you really need to know.

If you're at all like me, and I know I am, you gotta know the goddess-figure in the game changes her tone over time. But at the outset, all that basic-level sarcasm wore so thin I turned off her voice. At my first hour I had taken pause to write a screed of a review that was all uppercase, fire and fury. I think I even wrote, "Leave me alone, tobla...rone!" Ooooh. Acid burn, me. But yes, I turned off her voice. Her audio was quite good quality; it was clear, well-enunciated, no mic-blasting plosives or anything else. But all the same, off. I don't think you understand how major an event that was for me, I disliked the sarcasm that much. Folks, in fear of tipping my hand about me a little, I've been gaming from before we had any voice samples at all, and [i]any[/i] voice samples was a rare, diskspace-eating treat. I like plots in games. So I listen to every clip, watch every cutscene, because those were so rare in the past they were the magic icing on an otherwise delicious cake. Err, software cake. Yeah, I don't know about that allusion either. So anyway, sorry voice actress, I didn't like being sarcasticed-at. I think it's the first time ever I've turned the volume off on a sound channel that wasn't music. Anyway, that aside, it's a first-person puzzle game, in the same vein as Talos Principle or The Entropy Center. Move key items about, use them to activate machines or bypass obstacles, etc. What separates this game from the others is you have a swap mechanic: certain items can be zapped and, having zapped two different items, they swap places. It lets you build stairs, pull items out of awkward locations, and so forth. So a bit of the game is looking for angles you can make a shot that bypasses annoyances and working out where you might like items to end up. The world is nice enough. It's pretty in a stylzed way, and I would have liked to see more. It's nice to want things, I know. As of this writing, I'm on the final battle. It's completely different than the rest of the game, requiring situational awareness and steady dodging rather than working out a puzzle sequence. And maybe I'll go back to it, but I'm not entirely sure if I will. The final fight changing up entirely from puzzles to dodging doesn't fill me with glee. This is also my standard for reccommending games. Would I go back to it? Did I look forward to playing more? Up until the final map, I was positive. And I'll add a bit of indie love atop that to make sure the scales are tipped over into the positive. But what about you? There's three, maybe four (if you're very leisurely) hours of puzzlin'. Get it at a price tag that suits you. But if you want some first-person puzzlin', there's only a handful of games to cater that, and this is one.

If you're vulnerable to motion sickness, don't play this one Edit after completion: otherwise also just not that good of a game. It's short, the voice is annoying and the puzzles are not that special and rely more on placing restrictions on you than on creativity with the power you are given.

I just really dislike puzzle games that start out with static logic but then the only difficulty increase is making them time-based where you have to click on things really fast or move across the room in time to click on something really fast. Mostly because then my Mum can't play them.

Very short for the cost. Half the levels were basically tutorials, <2 hrs to beat it all, including listening to all the dialog and some time in one level. Needs more content.

Güzel görsellere sahip, hikayesel anlamda pek bir iddiası bulunmayan kısa ve eğlenceli bir portal klonu. Yer değiştirme mekaniği gayet yaratıcı. Tobla abla bir Glados veya Elohim tabi ki değil ama eğlendiriyor. Puzzle severler için çıtır çerez bir alternatif. Yoklukta gider. 7/10