Recent reviews by Phlosioneer

Solid puzzle game. No extreme leaps of logic.

The controls are clunky/awkward, the movement is slow, the puzzles' UI is difficult to use, and the puzzles are just boring. The game is also really bad at communicating where you're allowed to walk - one beach will be walkable with a required puzzle, while another beach has an invisible wall. Some rock piles are jumpable, others could be jumped but there's an invisible wall. That sucks in a game about exploring.

It takes a lot to make me cry, in general. It's even harder for a game to make me cry. But this one managed it. And not just a teary-eyed moment, full sobbing. From a character's passing.

Yeah. Yeah this game is going to be tough to get through.

16 hours, 30% complete, at an obsessive-binge-play pace. This game is huge.

The wit is sharper than any weapon in the game. Can be super chill, a fun tactics game, or very challenging puzzle game, up to you and your playstyle. Excellent game.

If you played Portal 2 and thought "Yes, I want 5+ more hours of this", this is the game for you. Depending on who you are, that might be a good review, or it might be a bad review.

The time reversing mechanics are well developed. This game has a high production value and a lot of polish.

This game feels like a mod of Portal 2; maybe that's how it started development. They take so, so, SO many things from it. From its plot, from its puzzles, from its environment, from its asthetic, from its humor. The only puzzle elements that are unique to this game, Transformers and Collapsible Boxes, are under-utilized.

Very fun languages. Very good puzzle design, they're very deliberate about how they teach you the languages, without being too obvious or heavy-handed.

This review is for the game when it was launched.

This is a fantastic game. There's less replayability than other games of the same genre; you'll probably play each area 2 to 4 times each at most. However, the enjoyment for each play through more than makes up for the replayability issue.

The mechanics are simple, yet quite tricky to master. You can undo once, which is very helpful for misclicks but doesn't let you cheat by looking multiple moves into the future. The tutorial is extremely effective, but not intrusive.

It's important to know that you're paying mostly for the story, not the gameplay. I had that backwards going into it. Overall a good game though. Controls are good enough, it definitely feels a bit like a mobile game. Not a ported mobile game, but a game with messy inputs in mind.

Combat is not very good in this game. That's fine, metroidvanias don't have to have good combat. But the game clearly THINKS it has great combat, because a lot of it is combat, and the early bosses are extremely brutal. You have no dodge or dodge-like abilities for a long while but the bosses feature unavoidable attacks in some cases. Unkillable, unavoidable enemies are common early on.

And the combat is not "hard but fun", it's just hard for no particular reason. I play a lot of souls games which feature "hard but fun" combat, where good planning and execution is rewarded. Here, there are no rewards. For example, there's no way to restore health except for save points, and there's no way to conserve health with skillful play. The difficult combat doesn't feed into the exploration or the satisfaction of the game, dealing with new enemies doesn't create new puzzles to solve. The solution is usually just "run through it" or "avoid it." Cheap-shot enemy placement is common.

I couldn't make it very far, so I can't comment on the rest of the game, though I generally believe the other reviews that it's probably amazing.

The core of this game is really fun. The story is really interesting. The writing is excellent. The puzzles are fun.

But after visiting enough places, it just... starts telling you the answers to puzzles. Before you have enough information to put them together yourself.

Here's just one example. I looked at the inscription on a coin and it was three words. Two of the words were brand new. One of the words, I had seen in ONE other place, and I didn't have a good guess for that place either. And the character was like, "Yup, that middle word is definitely 'of'." I literally didn't have enough information to figure that out on my own! I didn't press any button like "This is my final answer", I didn't ask for any hints, and it wasn't framed as a hint. It was absolutely, game-mechanically certain that word was "of", and I couldn't choose any other option, for the rest of the game.

This is one concrete example, but it happened 6 more times, with similarly baffling circumstances. There was no logic behind the character's assertion, there was no reasoning given.

The puzzles are good but the game spoils its own answers before you have a chance to figure it out yourself.