Once again we are dealing with a game added to my backlog via my time subscribed to the Humble Bundle. In this case I was interested to see this as the early game in the month since all the buzz around it had my curiosity, but I wasn't ready to pick it up. Let me just say I'm glad that's how I got it because there is no way in HELL it's worth the asking price... and that the developer thinks it is is just the first hint of how up his own ass this developer must have been when making this. Let's step inside.
Story: I have got to be honest with you... I don't believe this game has a story... it only pretends to have one. Playing from start to finish you will wander around what amounts to a moment frozen in time with all the people on the island turned to stone. And while the game seems to THINK there is a point to this, it's just a pretentious developer smelling his own farts and letting his voice actors spout philosophical quotes like that somehow makes a deep story. I wish I was kidding.
This is one of those cases where I have to give a spoiler to explain why this is so bad, so if you want to play this for yourself, please skip past the indented and italicized text.
The game starts with you running out of a tunnel with a few simple puzzles in the way till you get to the outdoors within a castle. A few more puzzles and you are free to explore a frozen world where people were going about their daily lives till they were turned to stone. But the event that seems to have done so happened at the top of a mountain where you will complete the experiment when you unlock enough of the power sources set to fire lasers at it... or so it seems.
When you actually get there and finish that last puzzle, it opens a gate and industrial stairway which leads to a few last rooms before, I shit you not, you find a room with a frozen guy making the next puzzle! It's just like Myst, right? That makes it deep, right?
Oh but there is still one final room after that, which completing leads to an elevator-like box which will fly you around the island while mumbling comments about bubbles and thought and trying to sound deep but is really just rambling while all the lasers turn off and you return back to the tunnel you ran out of. So in short, this ending really is so far up the developer's ass, I'm pretty sure he is still tasting it now after it has been out a few years.
I honestly wish the game didn't try to act like it had a story as that would honestly have been better AND more honest with us all. But hey, at least the "secret ending" is amusing (and far faster to reach).
2/10
Graphics: If this game actually did one thing well, it was the ascetics. I mean, this is a game that is really nice to look at. It doesn't try to be reallistic, but chooses a more colorful look. You will wander varied locations from a swamp to castle and just about everything in between, and it all just looks pleasantly saturated and almost painting like. There really isn't a moment when this game doesn't look it's best, and if you want to enjoy the view, please feel free to do so. It will not disappoint.
9/10
Sound: With a simple and still setup comes a very minimalist sound-range. This game does not feature music at all, choosing to let the wind and your footsteps be the most common thing you hear... at least they did well with it as each area reflects the grounds you are in. And the same can be said for all the other sound effects in this game.
Even the voice-acting is pretty good for what it is. All the voices are clean and clear, but they are very sparse in the form of tapes you can find throughout your journey and the gibberish the game has them babble at you at the very end. Sadly, though even those tapes are just quotes from philosophers thrown in there to make the game "sound smart."
6/10
Gameplay: And this is where the game really shits the bed. If you are not going to have a real story, your gameplay has to be all the better for it, and this time, it just is not. You will play this game from a first person view and just about all you will do is explore and solve puzzles you find. At first, this works exceptionally well, as your first puzzles are relatively easy to figure out as each one is a maze to solve, but it won't be long till you realize this is the ONLY kind of puzzle you will be doing. Every interaction with this game is done by sliding a line through a maze of sorts (even if its only a single line to represent a switch or something), so if you wanted a variety of puzzles, you are shit out of luck.
But at least the game also shows you it will slowly build in new pieces to these mazes and teach you the rules of them. And it does this in amazingly creative ways requiring you to consider the environment in what it might teach you or even how you look at the puzzles to solve them. But there are times when the developer starts reaching strongly into the complaints many have of the worst "point and click" games where he expects you to think exactly like him making some "clues" exceptionally hard to pick up on or valid answers not working because it wasn't what he wanted you to do despite fitting the rules he's shown you... and then we can get to the sound bullshit where you literally have to read his mind to understand, like when birds chirping are a clue and how you interpret them to get your answer for example.
He also fails to explain all the pieces later in the game as you will find your freedom to wander often leads to pieces you have not yet seen the "tutorial puzzles" for yet... assuming those actually manage to explain in the "learn by doing" style this game revels in.
But I think the moment when most people have a right to turn the game off in disgust is the bunker, where again, I am going to have to use a spoiler to explain:
One of the key "rules" of puzzles in this game is that when you have colored squares, you need to separate the different colors from each other to complete the maze puzzle correctly, but the Bunker turns this rule on it's ear. When you reach the bunker, you will find yourself using tinted glass to see the colored pieces not as they actually are, but as they need to be seen to get the right answer. This is actually clever and good preparation for the second half of the area... if only it is done right. Some of the pieces are only "close enough" and make at least one puzzle unnecessarily difficult with no good explanation due to one piece being off enough to be seen as a different color through the glass, even though it shouldn't be..
The big issue, however, is in the elevator that makes the second part. Each floor is bathed in a colored light, changing the layout of a single puzzle so you have to get more answers out of it, each one lifting the elevator to the next floor and the next edition of the puzzle... until the third floor. At this point, the wire you light up this way is broken, and you literally have to guess what the next floor will need to skip it, and you need to get through this to activate one of the lasers for the end of the game.
So yeah, what starts as an interesting game degenerates into the developer expecting you to know his internal thinking when he designed the game in order to proceed. More up his own ass territory.
5/10
Bugs: For all the faults in design, this game didn't have any in functioning. It ran exactly as it should.
Overall: Right now, I am really glad this game came from a humble bundle and I didn't actually pay for it. I would be livid with this tripe if I had actually bought it. As it is, I stand dumbfounded on just how far one developer can climb up their own ass in a desperate attempt to look profound without "cancelling sequels they never announced." Give this game a skip. It looks nice, but it really doesn't offer anything else but some pretty scenery.
Score:
4/10
System Requirements:
- 1.8 Ghz processor
- 4 GB RAM
- Intel HD 4000 series graphics
- 5 GB hard drive space
- Windows 7
- Ryzen 7 (2700) 3.2 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 1660 (6GB VRAM)
- Windows 10 (64 Bit)
No comments:
Post a Comment