You’re either stuck and helpless, or the game essentially calls you stupid by solving the puzzle for you.Īdditionally, many of the items you’ll need to grab from the environment are simply too hard to see at first glance. When your only hint options range from getting potentially no help whatsoever to getting a complete spoiler, either via an overenthusiastic thought bubble hint or the locked walkthrough book, it can be hard to feel confident about your abilities as a puzzle solver. The thought-bubble hint system is often too vague, or too specific it either tells the player something they already know, or spoils an entire puzzle. That said, I couldn’t help but still get frustrated from time to time. And even if you do open the walkthrough book, its integration with the game as a whole makes it feel less like you’re a cheating little bitch and more like you’re just using the tools afforded to you. Whenever you get stuck, you’re forced to make a simple choice: do I want to waste time playing the not-fun game to open the spoilery book, or do I just wanna try harder? No matter what your choice, you still haven’t alt+tabbed to GameFAQs you’re still in the game, immersed in its wonderful atmosphere. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a walkthrough implemented in such a remarkably clever way. Should you have the skill, and more importantly, the patience to complete it, the book will open and reveal a walkthrough of the entire room you’re in, conveyed via an ink-and-pencil comic strip. You can open this book by playing an intentionally boring LCD shmup on the book’s cover. Should you need more assistance, your protagonist - for reasons never explained - always has a locked book in his inventory. If you can stand somewhere, it’s because there’s something that needs to be done at that specific point in space a lever to be pulled, a logic puzzle to be solved. While I was initially frustrated that the game forced me to move only to predetermined points (again, if you read our preview, “frustrated” may be an understatement), I eventually understood why the folks at Amanita did it: every single hot spot includes something important that can be interacted with. Rather than allowing you to just click anywhere in the world and move there, your movement is restricted to specific hot spots. Thus, it’s very difficult (but not impossible - more on that in a bit) to feel completely confused about where you need to go, what you need to do, and what tools you have at your disposal to accomplish those aims.Įven the player’s movement within a location has been streamlined. Those few areas you cannot access immediately are clearly marked, and feel less like distracting maybe-solutions for other puzzles and more like isolated reminders: “yes,” the game says, “go to the greenhouse and solve an abstract lite-brite-esque puzzle, but don’t forget you’re also looking for a key to the arcade. You may enter a room with the intent of finding an item to be used in a different area, but you’ll still be able to essentially solve all the puzzles in a location without leaving to get another inventory item or talk to another character.
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