I just finished this last night, after it consumed the better part of my last two weeks. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in puzzle adventure games. It's got classic adventure game design, with lots of doors to unlock and puzzles to solve. It's basically a "Puzzle Mansion" that you are breaking down bit by bit by exploring for clues, and then putting those clues together to solve puzzles. It's challenging, but not brutally so. I never felt completely stuck at any point, and I was able to 100% it without looking anything up. I've probably got 30-40 notebook pages worth of doodles from this game alone!
Sounds cool! I recently heard someone describe the first Resident Evil in a similar way.
Yeah, I'd say a good way to describe this to someone familiar with old school RE (but maybe not classic Sierra adventure games) is that it's like RE1 but without the zombies/horror/combat. It's got all of the exploration, item management and puzzle solving aspects.
There are a few puzzles that were a direct homage to RE1 and RE2 so I have no doubt that they were inspirations for the developers.
I'm playing this now! Either I'm an idiot probably or it's not as easy as you made it sound, lol.
It's definitely more complex than Resident Evil puzzle stuff, lots of number puzzles to solve, keeping track of different things you got in different areas, some thinking outside of the box. And it throws a bunch of you at once so you can't necessarily just focus on one puzzle at a time, you get some new clue and it isn't necessarily connected to anything right in front of you. (But sometimes it is!) It took me like a half hour after getting into the house to solve anything in the house at all. And I think one or two I semi-solved and brute-forced the rest of the numbers.
Awesome, glad someone else is playing this! I think you'll really like it.
You will definitely get stuck on individual puzzles but there are some that you just won't be able to solve until you have all the necessary info. There's almost always some other path to go down and explore. I only ever got totally stuck one time, in that I felt I fully exhausted everything that I could and I wasn't progressing any further. It ended up being a puzzle that I didn't think I could solve yet but imo the solution was really dumb (for future reference, it was the piano puzzle).
But yeah I'm deeper into it now. It's really neat! Feels like playing one big ass escape room. But with harder puzzles and no time limit. And yeah I know escape rooms are built off of video game mechanics, but few games actually play like an escape room. So it's interesting playing one that really, really does.
I'd say I have a lot of open strings at the moment but it's more like a huge jumbled yarn ball that I am slowly pulling apart however I can with no clear idea if and when I will get stuck. It took me way too long to realize that I already had everything I needed for the shortcuts and document tubes so I've been going back a bit to do some of those, though they seem helpful but not mandatory.
Definitely a case of me overthinking it. Coming from a musical background I thought the notes on the staff had to matter in some way, but since the solution had absolutely nothing to do with music, I couldn't see it. That was the only one I looked up!
Oh my god I was wondering why the first floor map is so hard to find and it turns out it isn't, it's right there when you enter the building, I JUST DIDN'T NOTICE IT EVERY TIME I RAN PAST IT.
Anyway I have all the maps now, everything is coming up Milhouse!
BTW I haven't been using a notebook at all. I can see how it could help a little with some stuff but I'm just like, whatever, the game stores most stuff as memories anyway.
Ohhhhh boy. I'm at like 88% but I really just don't know how to move forward at this point. I only have like 5 open ends but I'm not quite sure which I can pursue right now. My map is as filled out as it can be? and I have walked over every room again just to make sure I didn't miss anything.
There are two things that I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be able to solve with what I have but something just isn't clicking. I really wanted to get through the whole game without "cheating"* but I don't know how much longer I can stare at stuff without my brain making the right connections. Hard to know if I'm missing a piece I need or I'm just not seeing some connection.
*I did at one point feel stuck and look up where I should go next and found out I had to go back to the gatehouse but I don't count that as cheating because it's not a puzzle per se. Also I don't know if it was hinted at in game or not but if it was, I missed the hint.
I only "cheated" twice and neither time was on the puzzles, more just "where should I be going at this point?" I guess you could say that figuring out where to go is part of the puzzle too but whatever. NO REGERTS.
Overall I think this is such a great puzzle game. The puzzles fit in that perfect sweet spot for me where little is obvious but none of it is overly obtuse need a guide to solve type stuff. I'd probably say that for the non-linear / don't always know exactly what you need to do exploration as well.
Nothing is really handed to you, but you can figure it out eventually. I definitely stared at the screen turning the gears in my brain for awhile before it clicked sometimes. Or just left stuff alone and thought well, maybe it will make sense eventually. And it usually did.
The story is pretty cool too, although at a certain point it becomes kind of obvious what is going on. Still, the way it is presented is pretty wild.
Glad to see you liked it @Zero! It was one of the more enjoyable experiences I had with a game last year.
The story was the only thing I was really mixed on. It's presented in a cool way for sure, but it was similar to how I felt about Signalis (and other games/films, for sure) where all of this weird and crazy stuff is going on, and it gets a very easy-to-hand-wave "it's all just somebody's dying fever dream" conclusion. I'm always left feeling hollow and wishing I never got invested in trying to piece the story together.
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