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Far too much walking around vs actual puzzles. Too many easy puzzles; I felt like I was still doing tutorials even in the last chapter, there are a few good ones though. I didn't like the writing or voice acting.

dead ringer OP

its ok i guess

explore space but it's also majora's mask. wait a minute you go to the moon in majoras mask too so i guess its just majoras mask. but instead of unlocking items to progress you unlock KNOWLEDGE which you store in your real actual brain

Excellent game. Maybe the most *fun* puzzle game I've ever played.

The difficulty of the puzzles is "just right", and the way they are woven together and reused is very satisfying. There are many great, memorable moments of surprising and/or cool ♥♥♥♥ that happens.

What really sets this apart from any other game is how perfectly (not too obvious, not too obscure) it manages to guide you through "where to go next", while somehow also keeping the world completely open and non-linear. (Though it loses this in the last act, where it becomes very linear)

There's a few puzzles that are a bit too familiar, but it mercifully omits Towers of Hanoi.
Graphics are good, if a little bland and unoptimised.
The story is fun and fits the game well and starts promising, but unfortunately ends up making no sense (why couldn't the guy just build something to automate your ultimate task of... moving a piece of paper across the room...). And the cutscene where the magic sparkle woman expositions her side of the story to you really misses the mark.

Terrible puzzle game, ok first-person looker. Absolutely atrocious experience compared to Myst 1-4 and Quern.

If you wanted to play a fun adventure/puzzle game: this is not for you, go play Quern.
If you want to follow a walkthrough to walk around a pretty world and be told a story, maybe play this.

0. The good stuff
The world/graphics are impeccable. The story is creative, interesting, and almost makes sense.

1. This is not a puzzle game
The primary gameplay involves running repeatedly back and forth around the huge, empty levels, either pulling levers or reading and inputting codes to open paths. There are several remnants of objects that look like they were puzzles, or ways to guide the player through the story, but have been subsequently removed. My friend put it quite well: "It's like playing a Myst game where someone else was here just before and solved all the puzzles for you". Infuriatingly, the game actively mocks its own lack of puzzles, at one point presenting a fake decoy puzzle that is revealed to just be a counterweight to yet another lever to open a path. Another mechanic gradually introduced and recurring through the second half of the game tricks you into thinking it will be an interesting puzzle, but then is actually solved by just inputting random combinations until it works, and then the same combination is used to complete all instances of it.

The core gameplay mechanic of "swapping" parts of the landscape looks extremely promising, and could have been used to create some great puzzles. Unfortunately, for most of the game the "solution" to these sections is to just do the one thing you could possibly do, which is usually to perform the swap and then spend 5 minutes running all the way back around the world to the other side again to the path it has opened.
There is one(1) area near the end of the game that actually has an actual puzzle to solve, using this mechanic, and it was ok (would have been great, but made tedious by having to go through several loading screens to make each "move").

2. Walkthrough is mandatory
Maybe around 50% of the paths you open lead to dead ends, and there is absolutely no guidance as to what is a dead end and what is the "next" part of the path to follow. At several points in the game, it lets you go very far down a particular path, only to find that the next step is actually somewhere entirely different. Although the graphics are good technically, each of the large main areas pretty much looks the same throughout and so are extremely difficult to navigate. The snails-crawl movement speed (and no kind of fast travel) also makes it incredibly tedious to revisit areas and look around, so I struggle to see how anyone could tolerate playing this game without referring to a walkthrough at various points.

When you inevitably get stuck, it's not the good kind of "I can't figure out this puzzle" stuck. It's the bad kind of "I have no concept of where I am supposed to go next" stuck. There was never a moment that I read the walkthrough and said "ah, of course, how silly of me", it was always "ok well how the ♥♥♥♥ was I supposed to know to go there next".
It seems they have gone so far off the deep end of "story and graphics first, gameplay last" that they have forgotten how to design a playable game.

3. Storytelling
Rather than gradually reveal the mystery of the world to you as it guides you through the levels with information scattered around in various forms, it infodumps 10 pages of text on you at once, early on, in a single room, that almost entirely explains everything that is going on.

4. ???????????????????????
ALL OF THAT ASIDE, they have managed to do something so absolutely atrocious and game breaking that it defies belief.

*They patched out the solution to the final "puzzle"*
Near the very end of the game, you need to input yet another code to yet another machine to progress.
They patched out the thing that shows you the code post-release.
What??? Who *does* that??????
I think I understand the "logic" they are intending you to follow to work out the code instead, and really "logic" is not the word for it.
(Also, the machine you put that code into leads to another dead end, but visiting the dead end magically and nonsensically opens a completely disconnected door elsewhere in the level. All for the purpose of hamfistedly showing you a ""twist"" in the story that was already blindingly obvious... plus 2 minutes later the ""twist"" is re-revealed anyway!?!?)


To sum up, in an attempt to focus more on the story and immersion over puzzles, the developers seem to have forgotten what actually made Myst good (and what actually allows immersion to take hold). Infuriatingly, all of the elements that could make this game brilliant are there, they just aren't put together competently. Go play Quern instead.


(Quern is essentially the inverse of this game; it brings the puzzles to the forefront with the story as support, and smoothly leads you through a vast array of brilliantly interconnected challenges, but the graphics are a little bland (and unoptimised) and the end of the story ends up not making any sense)

I can't recommend it or not. The core gameplay is great, but there are a lot of problems. If you like the demo and would like to play with variations on it on ~25 levels, go for it. An extra gameplay mechanic gets chucked in halfway to spice things up a little.

It's a lot like Portal in that it's a small, short puzzlish game with an excellent, original atmosphere and style, but it's nowhere near as polished.
Story is compelling and fun, but only 2 hours long. Half of the challenge modes are good, half are garbage, there's about 12 in total. Endless mode is fun but you don't have any rewards or goals. Time-trial mode is the same. What sealed the deal for me continuing to play was the secret-finding exploration mode.

It's fun to start up and play one or two levels for 5mins.
Add a level editor and proper way to share them and this would be solid gold.

~~~ Here's all the problems that should be easily fixed ~~~

Endless modes and time-trial modes are lack-luster; it doesn't compare scores against friends or give rankings/grades. Stupidly, the first ~1.5 seconds of in-game time occur with the loading screen still up, so you have to begin blindly to get the best times, not that there is anything motivating you to improve your time past the single goal they give. Endless mode is fun, but the game gives you no milestones to aim for - all of the unlockables (timed endless modes) are unlocked by total kills ever rather than top score.

Irredeemable bugs:
There's a minigame that doesn't stop the music on exiting, leaving it looping over itself and forcing a restart. Some achievements are bugged, including giving me the "complete all time trials" achievement when I only did 5 of them. Worst of all, completion of the last level you do before quitting IS RANDOMLY NOT SAVED SO YOU HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN.

Graphics:
The brightness can be a bit difficult to look at sometimes.
Animations are janky, which is a bit weird because they literally only have one animated model.
It is also somehow jittery at times? VSync is broken and doesn't lock to 60fps. Level 21 is very laggy for no apparent reason.
Settings menu is pitiful, you have about 3 graphics options and can't change key bindings.

Gameplay:
Thrown objects will very occasionally bounce off or pass through enemies for no apparent reason.
Thrown objects move faster than bullets. If you shoot and immediately throw a gun, the bullet hits the gun.
I don't know why they don't have time completely stop, it makes for a much more precise experience.
When you land from a jump the screen gets a pointless and annoying/disorienting shock effect.
You can't really tell how much ammo your gun has left, reducing your ability to plan stuff.
The gun reload animation is ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and you can't tell how long it has left until you can fire again.
The end-of-level replays aren't quite satisfying enough, they're still too slow.
If an enemy breaks something too close to themselves they get stunned, which is a bit lame.

-- Badly ported: crashes often, I couldn't finish because I can't get it to start again without crashing
- Annoying DRM that doesn't work very well: I've had to enter the CD key repeatedly.
- Themes very far from original Max Paynes
- Bad story, told through loads of long cutscenes
- Intended feeling of rush/panic at odds with need to explore/find collectables

+ Fun mechanics
+ Very good experience of playing an action movie (this game is essentially Die Hard: the videogame)
+ "Max Payne-y" enough to not be too disappointing