Recent reviews by Weaver

Pretty, and it got me to sit down and finish it in one go. Usually a puzzle game like this has either a timing or a complexity difficulty cliff somewhere in the middle, and feels like it suddenly switches from fun to work. Not this one.

I did end up a bit confused about the story; I'm not even sure how many people there are. Would love to read a scholar's analysis or an eventual author reflection on it.

Ok, I got this because of Extra Credits also, and I've got half a mind to go suggest that they talk about the fact that it's 2016 and we're still seeing first person games that don't let you invert the mouse y axis. (The static speaks my name, another recommendation of theirs, also has this problem; I only suffered through it because I knew it was only like 5 minutes long.)

There's also the two minute opening unskippable title screen, the pressing-enter-resets-the-game issue (forgotten debug feature maybe, but use an F key or something for crying out loud), the generally lower FPS than feels appropriate for any given thing I'm looking at (which might have something to do with motion blur per other reviews but I didn't even notice the blur) and the lack of even the most basic kind of progression memory (it's a one sitting game, and I've no idea how long it is)... I think I'm going to go refund this thing rather than have to split my "Bad/Unplayable/Whygodwhy" category out into a "I can't play this unless I fork over money to a third party, maybe" category. (Yeah Over The Void I'm looking at you...).

Yeah, that's the particularly insidious problem with the mouse invert. While it should only take an if statement and flipping a sign in the mouselook handler to implement (seriously even alerting the player that e.g. I toggles mouse invert should take more work than actually making it work), there's exactly one workaround the user can use in all of the internets, and it's another 15$ or something piece of software that isn't even straightforward to buy. (It's called MAFMouse if you're curious.) Every other inverter I've seen or heard about, including autohotkey scripts and various little tray apps, works on the desktop but does nothing in a game.

So it's really up to the developer to add this basic feature.

Too bad, I really like odd surreal stuff to explore.

You know that thing you get in 3d games where you have a detailed object with crisp textures laying on a blobbish texel smear of some large-scale background? This is that, in a 2D game. Every sprite has a different DPI on screen, it feels like.

Also the text apparently only looked good on the original testing resolution; it scales badly.

Retro or "low-quality" art is fine, just see undertale or nidhogg. The random inconsistancy is what kills it.

The controls are kinda sticky, at least in switching to movement to the right.

I didn't get much past the stew, but other reviews seem to indicate that I've already seen about half the game. Short games are fine, but...

The writing is also slightly off. Not bad-bad, but if you're putting something up for sale... try to get someone with at least a slight college level expereince in proofing and copyediting to go over it -- someone who didn't write it. Given the amount of text between the game, the website, and steam itself, I'd guess that's maybe a half hour's work.

The less text you have the more important it is to get it right.

All in all it looks like a good first finished game project from a new dev, but I just keep asking myself, why is it on steam?

Ok, so, it's a Myst-ish game, a puzzle/escape/explore game where you navigate through a sequence of pre-rendered vistas (many of which you can pan around to give a semblance of 3d location). The characters are early 3d, the player character resembling an early attempt to 3d-ify the Avatar from the Ultima series.

97% of the game involves looking at static objects and environment, though, which are mostly pretty.

The puzzles are passable, and I manged to make it through much of the game without help. I did get stuck for a rather long time near the beginning because I missed the left-most view of the tables full of stuff in the house near the beginning.

There is one puzzle in the third act that really made me mad, though. At one point where the path is blocked, on turning back you will see an item. It is the item you need, and is not held down by anything, but you can't pick this one up. You need to find or have already stumbled upon a different copy of the item in a different area. That copy of the item can only be found by turning to the side and looking down with no prompt to do so to find it in an area that you should have been able to see it from other locations in, but cannot.

The plot is largely forgettable -- get all the pieces of the magic whatsit before the bad guy can -- and backed up by mediocre voice acting and characters with strange names I can't remember a few hours after playing. This is passable, if you're playing for the puzzles, except for the ending. I won't spoil it just in case someone cares, but I'll say that I actually expected a final area to play after the last cutscene and was kind of shocked when the credits rolled.

Yeah, I can't really recommend this to anyone but the most masochistic puzzle-hound who's played every other game in the genre already.

Oh, and you can't play it in anything but fullscreen of 800x600/1024x768, which makes multiple monitor people like me sad.

I played the tech demo for this game back in the early days of the Unreal Development Kit, when it was still called "Hazzard: The Journey of Life", and thought it was awesome. Then I forgot about it. Then someone gave me this game and I eventually installed it and loaded it up and THEN realized I HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE.

That was awesome, and the entire game was awesome from beginning to end. Only a couple puzzles stumped me and I ended up reading a guide and solving them a different way anyway.

It's a first person puzzle game. It's about exploring and contemplating. Can't really say much more than that without ruining it.