Recent reviews by Sinner

At the time of writing, Im going to be giving this game the first and only negative review on the board. I'm doing this because I feel like people should know what they are getting into when they purchase this game. Most of the time, this game is great, most of the time. The problem is that some of the time, the puzzles take logical leaps that are completely arbitrary, which lead to extremely frustrating puzzles that are not signposted or explained in any way.

This review is going to include some spoilers, if you don't like that, let me say that I think this game is worth picking up, but you should know that there are problems, and you'll likely run into them. Some Puzzle solutions are so logically inconsistent that even once told the answer, and told why its the answer, you'll still struggle to understand how it could possibly be the answer. I do not think it is a mistake that many of the glowing reviews for this game received the game for free and playtested the puzzles. I do not know how the puzzles evolved but I suspect that certain puzzles were developed over weeks or months and only the "best" were picked, and with the entire sample of puzzles, they end up making more sense, or the solutions are more obvious.

/////spoilers now/////

Let's start with the map. There is no map. There is a hastily scribbled sorta map that sometimes sorta shows the locations of things, but only after you've already found them, and only the first puzzle in the set. The game usually has what I'm going to call a little "tutorial" puzzle before you are allowed into the actual puzzle. In theory these test your basic knowledge of the puzzle before you see the puzzles proper and are usually extremely easy and intuitive, this is great, when it actually explains the rules intuitively. Or when you actually end up seeing them. It's entirely possible to miss several of these on your way to the puzzles proper. Which happened to me, more than once. It can be hard at time to tell what is a path, and what is not a path. Sometimes puzzle areas are divided so that you have to solve one section then walk around the map to the other section. On at least one occasion I thought I had solved an area and then realized there was a poorly positioned cave/underpass that continued the puzzle area, which I had assumed I had entered in the wrong way.

I'm going to directly talk about some puzzles now.

MOST of the puzzles are fine, some puzzle areas go from fine to nonsense very quickly, some turn to complete nonsense only on the final puzzle. These are not nonsense because they are hard to understand, they are nonsense because they are impossible to understand unless you try several logical leap assumptions about the previous puzzles. Sometimes it can feel like you are brute forcing a puzzle, a few times I ended up accidentally brute forcing a puzzle just trying all the different ways I thought the game might be trying to test me. I'm going to specifically talk about two sections of the game now, these include the logical solutions to some of the puzzles.

In the "Tree puzzle area" you start by comparing the height of leaves. The highest leaves get selected, if there are multiple of the same height they all get selected. The puzzle then teaches you that what matters is the highest on each BRANCHING PATH. This makes sense. After this "tutorial" area you are given 3 puzzles and one extra puzzle, that are much harder and use more natural looking trees. During these puzzles, the leaves cease to count, and only the branches count. The game never signposts this, or explains it in any way. Before this the leaves counted, now they do not. There is no middle intermediate section for this puzzle, and frustratingly two of the puzzles can be solved using the old method that counts the leaves. Leaving you completely dumbfound when you find the last puzzle. What you are supposed to do, is go back and try and figure out why the previous two answers were still correct with your incorrect viewpoint. Many people will simply look up the answer to this puzzle, and be disappointed to find the rules merely changed in the middle.

There is a second area which I'm going to call the "ruins" area which has several columns. This is by far the most frustrating puzzle in the game, and even after discovering all the strange rules, and brute forcing the final puzzle, I am unable to figure out why the final puzzle has that answer. I've watched guides at this point, and I have yet to see anyone explain the answer to that puzzle. When the ruins start, I immediately accidentally solved the first puzzle in this section, and didn't understand it at all, after struggling for a few minutes and leaving and coming back, I accidentally solved the second puzzle, and with both answers in front of me, it clicked what the puzzle was asking. At some point during these first few easier puzzles, I hope you notice that all the sets of two puzzles are mirror images of eachother, I didn't, and it took several guesses at a later puzzle to realize that was the case. Once I did realize the puzzles didn't get much easier, the pixel graphics do a terrible job at implying depth, and one of the puzzles is diagonal and I ended up merely guessing the answer because I couldnt "read" where the answer tiles were supposed to be in place. If this was the end of it, then i'd say it was my own fault. It's not. One of the puzzles is upside down, not inverted. There is no reason to ever believe that one of the puzzles could be upside down. I was stumped for a long time till I tried it arbitrarily remembering how previous puzzle rules had changed without warning. Then we reach the final puzzle in the ruins. I do not know how it is supposed to be solved. It breaks all the rules of the puzzles before it, and even knowing the answer now, and knowing what is supposed to tell you the answer, and knowing the unwritten rules of that specific puzzle, I have absolutely no idea why that is the answer. It simply is.

Unfortunately many of the puzzles take these logical leaps. There's no help coming either, you can just stare at your old solved puzzles and hope to spot a hint in them, or look at the pixels and hope to find out which moonlogic leap the puzzle is asking for NOW. Hopefully those new leaps won't be contrary to previous rules, but sometimes they will be. This problem stays with the game through it's entirety. There are very few sections that don't have at least one moonlogic puzzle.

There is an area which I'm going to call the shrine area, the mechanic here is that there are dice and you need to have the dice only connected to the exact number of panels as the number on the dice. During this section, and only this section, if you break the rules of one of the dice, the dice will light up red for a moment, so you can see which dice rule you are breaking easily. This allowed for experimentation, and later on when I found "anti dice" in a puzzle, I was able to determine that the anti-dice actually count for one more than their face. Meaning, they subtract the total panels that you need to connect to one dice, but ALSO the panel itself counts for one. So an anti-dice with 3 notches actually counts as FOUR panels. Because it has 3 notches, but also it counts as lighting up a panel. This was intuitive and once I figured it out I enjoyed the section greatly. sadly this feature is in no other puzzle in the game. For some it wouldn't work, but for some it certainly would, and I SORELY wish it was used in more puzzle areas.

/////spoilers over/////

Finally, for people who are coming here for the witness comparisons. If you ONLY liked the puzzles in the witness and wished the game was only a series of puzzles and walking, then this is what you're looking for. If you enjoyed the "plot-lite" of the witness or the theoretical sections, this doesn't have that.

I have trouble recommending this game completely, but found it enjoyable overall.

My name Is Jim, this is the perfect game.

I bought this game because it came highly recommended, and was compared along games like Antichamber, Superliminal, The beginners guide, and the Stanley parable.

Let's talk about the positives first. The game is visually stunning, though not graphically impressive. The vistas are amazing, and you'll be wishing that the many different rooms could be used as a screensaver. If you stop anywhere in the game and look into the distance, you have a desktop wallpaper. For 8 dollars, this might be enough for some people. If this WAS the entire game, just walking around in cool trippy vistas, I would be recommending this game.

So what makes this a hard skip? The puzzles. You can't just walk through this game looking at the very cool locations and enjoying this strange fractal universe. You are stopped every four seconds by puzzles, the puzzles are bland and uninteresting, the mechanics are boring and lifeless, they rarely if ever do anything interesting, and they have nothing to say about the world around you. The difficulty of each puzzle can be solely and linearly rated only on how long you have to walk to move a box to its respective box hole. There is nothing more to this game. There is no story, there is no narration, the music is middling to elevator-esque at best.

You will solve nearly every puzzle the moment you lay eyes on it just by picking up the pieces and bringing them to a hole, the very few puzzles that require any thought will be over before you even had a chance to realize that it was supposed to be a "milestone puzzle" before a difficulty reset back to basics with a new mechanic just as boring as the last. the puzzles are boring, and serve no purpose, I can't believe i'm saying this but I just wish there was less game in this game so I could just walk through and look at the pretty space.

TLDR, this is NOT Antichamber, Superliminal, or the Stanley Parable. You can get the FULL enjoyment of this game by scrolling through the screenshot section of it's community hub.

This games tries, but it should have tried a bit harder. This is not a rogue like, this is a dice rolling game. There is only luck, there is almost no skill.

Solid Metroidvania game that looks really nice, has amazing music, and is generally well rounded in all the ways that matter. Interesting system for building your character means that your loadouts can feel very "you" which a lot of metroidvania games tend to lack. Overall just a really enjoyable experience with very little in the way of true negatives.

Speaking of negatives
Having no penalty for dying was an odd choice considering the vibes and mechanics.
Bit short overall.
It really isn't bringing much new to the genre, it's perfectly solid but doesn't push ahead.

Overall, I'd say I came for the art and was extremely pleasantly surprised by the game being completely solid and competent for the entire run time.

vidya... game... play

bretty gud

I updated this because they gave me a meaningless cheevo that looked like a letter. This is what you wanted steam THIS IS IT.

This game is awful, really just terrible. Don't be fooled by the generic reviews. It's as bad as possible.

Good.