8 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 0.9 hrs on record
Posted: 24 May, 2020 @ 4:29pm

Dear game developer.

This is not to hurt feelings or anything, this is meant as constructive criticism.
The game isn't really good at what's it's doing in my opinion.

The thing is. I get it, the contemplative game, huge environments, minimalist character, emphasize on story and contemplation. All that doesn't mean bad game and deserve to be in gaming.

But I really feel that a lot of it is clumsy and causes the game to be kind of pointless in challenge and pacing.

-You have nice minimalist music but it is a 2 chords loops for some parts making it annoying really quickly
-You have some events like birds flying away stoping your gameplay and activating over and over again making it repetitive and not enjoying the beatiful uning background per vignette. That is really a shame because these events should sulbime the pace and the contemplation, not actualy stoping it or imposing you this break.
-At first there is a lot of dialogue that is not very well written, I mean it's just character talking, a lot of exposition, and some weird weird way to justify you as the protagonist.
-Character animation is too minimalist with the gorgeous and very complex pixel background. Making animation like jumping, climbing and other stuff not interesting.
-There is some kind of inventory system where you get stuff at the begining of the game that is actualy mandatory to deal with obstacle you don't have access before getting the items making them pointless.
-Speaking of these items you have also pointless obstacles. The only thing they do is block you and you have to press the same key for everything in order to get rid of them with your mandatory items. Why even bother ? You just have to stare longer at some screens that are not even the interesting ones.
-Some vignettes have unic ratio, but it's very rare when its one of the only cool feature of that game

I'm pretty sure I forget some things but the point is all that. It makes the game main purpose, contemplation, tedious. Really really tedious. If you could move more freely, your movement sinking better with the background. Better dialogue with actual effect on the text and color, music that don't always work around two chords. I mean this is so much stuff that could emphasize contemplation rather than going against it.
I feel like a lot of what's in the game is there in order to make it longer, or to make it feel more like a video game. To me it should be an interactive piece of art and shouldn't fall into video games cliche just because it identifies as one. It's ok to be minimalistic in gameplay too, I wouldn't have mind just pressing one key all game long, as long as it looks amazing.
Maybe just keep the flashback feature to make some screens beatiful in a different way.

Artwork is great.
Story is okay.
The flashback feature is cool.
The first temple is breathtaking, that one was amazing in every way.

Everything else could be improved upon.
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