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]
