My Playtime: 2.6h (100% achievement, finished the game)
Grindy Achievement(s): No.
Optional Achievement(s): Yes (~8 achievements).
Difficult Achievement(s): No.

LEAVES - The Journey is a point-and-click game that revolves around finding leaves in hidden object style and solving puzzles. There are a lot of puzzles with varying difficulty and 30 leaves to find throughout the area.

Pros:
- Unique and intuitive puzzles

Cons:
- Despite being mandatory to finish the game, the leaves can be hard to spot
- Confusing hint usage
- It's almost impossible to know where you are supposed to go and do next
- Most puzzles require you to have an insane memory or screenshot the hints
- Tons of backtracking

Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

No.
Although I liked the puzzles, the rest of the gameplay is just too annoying for me.

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The game uses a surreal artistic style. I originally thought that the visuals looked that way because it's an old game, but then I soon noticed the uniqueness. It worked well with how mysterious the world works, though. However, I don't like how it can be hard to find objects, especially the leaves, in the game due to the similarity in colors.

Gameplay
You can say that the game is a combination of point-and-click, hidden objects, and puzzles. Most areas can be unlocked either by solving puzzles or using your wits to use objects in your inventory to another object. However, the objects that you use sometimes just don't make any sense to me, and the leaves that were used to finish the game tend to blend with the background color, making it hard to see. I don't like how they can be too dark for me to see since increasing my brightness to find it would just burn my eyes since some objects can be too bright in that setting.

The point-and-click section tends to be confusing. While most of them require you to follow the in-game hints, they can be quite vague. A lot of them require you to remember or screenshot things that weren't obvious as a hint at first glance, that were placed several screens back. You need to do a lot of backtracking to find them blind, but it takes time to move screens due to the fade-in and fade-out animations. Heck, you still need to backtrack a lot even if you know where everything is, and it just takes too much time to do that.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1192562419

The worst thing is, that the hints themselves are made confusing - I don't know how to use them. The hint page showed me a pattern and I don't seem to be able to unlock it after I matched the pattern. I don't understand why the game makes the hint system to be as confusing as the in-game puzzles.

That being said, most puzzles are fun. They are mostly in the form of minigames with different setups. There aren't instructions to finish them, but most of them are intuitive - you'll notice how to do it most of the time. The in-game hints that you picked up several screens back might also help you to solve some of them, and these hints are vital if you want to finish all the puzzles and finish the game. I liked solving most of them; they never get boring.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2024389232

Length and Difficulty
I finished the game in 2.6h. To be honest, I used a guide a lot. It can be confusing to know where you are supposed to go without many hints to go to and the in-game hint system not working properly also makes it worse. The only good thing about that is that I'm able to get one achievement to finish the game without using any hints "easily" since I couldn't manage to figure out how to use it.

LEAVES - The Journey was just too confusing for me. It was never clear where you were supposed to go and what you were supposed to do. Moreover, it forced me to move between numerous screens with such slow fade-in and fade-out animation, which can possibly be longer if you are stuck and don't know what to do. While I enjoyed solving the puzzles, the rest of the game was simply unpleasant and didn't suit my taste. I couldn't recommend it because of those reasons.

Teaboy's Basic(ish) Reviews....I read a lot of reviews when looking at games on Steam, and it quickly gets tiring – those who write involved, down to the micron scale reviews, although helpful, end up like looking at War & Peace when you’ve only got time for a quick 5 minute dump! This is middle of the road and to the point – not easy for me as I tend towards sesquipedalian loquaciousness! Vociferously Verbose? Alright, verbal diarrhoea. (Although I hate panning a developer’s work and all the time, effort and love they put into designing these – it is their life after all – this is my honest, personal opinion of my level of enjoyment. Sorry devs!).

A note on time played: My Steam clock does not seem to work properly, indeed, it even minuses time on occasion! Plus, I have a tendency to wander off and leave games running at times, so time played may not be entirely accurate!


Teaboy’s Tonsil Titillators or Toenail Titbits! (Rating)

Tonsil Tickler (Totally Tops): The frenchy of which you always dreamt! To quote a master, “She’s got a tongue like an electric eel and she likes the taste of a Man’s tonsils!”. An absolute masterpiece and joy to play.

The Tits (Terrific): Everyone loves playing with these! Not THE best bit, but such fun on their own you can be lost for hours....mmmm. What most games you really like score – perfection is so rare after all.

Torso Teaser (Taker of your Time): It’s a flat stomach....sure it’s nice to look at, run your fingers over, slobber on a bit, sometimes that bellybutton gets your motor running....but it's just basically the corridor between the two ‘gaming rooms’. The definitive ‘Meh’ - the middle ‘sideways thumb’ option for which everyone on Steam cries.

Todger/Tadger & (scroTum) Taters (Tedious): Is it an ‘a’ or is it an ‘o’? Who cares! The meat can be fun to play with for about 5 minutes of your entire day, the rest it just hangs there and generally gets in the way of doing something else. The main problem of course, is the two veg sticking to your inside thigh. This is what this game feels like – the occasional/rare bouts of fun, the rest bobbing like a 19th century British Policeman (now you know why!).

Toenail Tornado (Total Toss): A playthrough so appalling it’s like being trapped in a Turkish sauna with the ugliest, hairiest, fattest, sweatiest beast of a neolithic hominid who’s trimming his toenails using pliers and the splinters are reminiscent of a scene from the Normandy Landings. My god how did this get released!?


Teaboy Touts (Score): TOENAIL TORNADO!!


The Review:

It actually pains me to give this game my lowest rating as it's a kick in the teeth to the devs and they've put together a good variety of unusual puzzles, some clever, some sigh-inducing as you know it's going to take ages, but hey-ho, some times are good, some times are bad. HOWEVER, regardless of thought put into it, it is a CONSTANT GLITCHED MESS!! Damn near every puzzle glitches, and the only thing to do is reload. And considering it's one of those games where you have to watch all the opening dev/sponsor ♥♥♥♥♥♥ this gets Really old Really fast. I got to the last frame on the first arm of the map and just can't see myself even bothering to try any further after banging my head against every puzzle glitching. Who knows, I paid for it after all, so maybe I'll torture myself in future - it took me circa 2 years just to play it! I must have subconsciously known....

And there's the sequel to play too....god give me strength.

good trading card

Epilepsy warning!!!

There is a segment where a few of the puzzles (and a path you may have to repeatedly go through) has a thunder+lightning effect. They used a rapid flashy strobing white light effect instead of one of the other ways this could be expressed.The puzzles in this room require alot of time looking at the screen doing stuff and this effect plays quite often. It is very painful for my head and eyes, I had to have someone else do these rooms and look away. I suspect it would be risky for anyone with a seizure illness.

No incredible puzzles, just another wordless weird puzzle world. Some puzzles are incredibly easy, but some are unreasonably obtuse, and there is no difficulty curve. It's not awful, but not really worth consideration over other puzzle games.

The game gives me a feeling like abstract art, but more dark and empty. The inventory or other interaction is kind of slow, as for the puzzles, they are more like chores if I have to solve them in such atmosphere.

someone pls explain this game to me it makes no sense

LEAVES - The Journey is a point and click puzzle/adventure game with a whimsical, esoteric theme not unlike Samorost. You click around a mysterious forest full of strange creatures and statues solving somewhat simple puzzles based on clues you can collect, and there's a little bit of inventory management involved as well. I think there's some kind of niche for these games, but the quality of this game in terms of implementation can't be saved by the intriguing theme and artwork.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.

The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.

For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static images with a few Flash-like sprites and objects on top... it might as well be a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only appears around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

LEAVES - The Journey has the laughable price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam (and on web browsers, like this game looks like it was designed for).

Borderline, but:

Puzzles have no basis in logic or the setting, just random patterns that need to be mimicked, etc.
UI sucks, inventory takes too long to open
Had to edit my save to fix a game breaking bug

Not great, but got it for less than a dollar anyway.

Unengaging.