Peregrin is a story puzzle game. A solitary traveller undertakes a perilous voyage through the haunted ruins of a lost civilisation. Seeking to fulfil an ancient prophecy, she will have to use her arcane powers to solve puzzles and survive battles - if she is to find a way to restore the fallen world of Peregrin.
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I think a lot of what Peregrin is trying to do is fairly interesting but I don't think it's very successful at anything it attempts. Peregrin is a linear, story focused puzzle game with themes of grief and decay.
The main hook in the narrative in Peregrin is that humanity has fallen into ruin due to becoming reliant on an element that they believed could give them infinite lifespans. The main character is on a journey to repent to the gods as well as deal with her own grief. I think this set up is pretty good. Humanity loses sight of what it means to grieve through defeating death is a strong narrative hook for a story about how death and grieving is a neccessiary part of the human experience. The problem that Peregrin runs into is that that kind of story is one to be told subtly and Peregrin is about as subtle as a freight train. Characters speak at each other so bluntly that its impossible to miss any meaning and the narrator has a habit of outright saying how our main character is feeling rather than trusting us to work it out ourselves. This issue with the narrator extends to some gameplay as well as the writing has a habit of telling us about a grand view or a terrifying sight that the protagonist is seeing without actually showing it to us.
The gameplay itself is fairly bland as far as puzzle games go. The protagonist can mind control different types of animals, each having a unique single ability that they can use to solve different environmental puzzles. This isn't a bad set of mechanics to create puzzles with, but I never felt the puzzles were especially interesting or satisfyingly challenging. Most of my time spent on them wasn't spent thinking of a solution but waiting for the creatures to complete their tediously slow walk cycles. On more than one occasion I solved the current puzzle immediately but had to spend three minutes slowly moving the creatures from place to place. The game is also littered with small issues like poor signposting and buggy pathfinding
Peregrin has some good ideas, and the people who made it obviously have a great deal of talent but the concept is poorly executed and I don't think I'm ever going to come back to it.
The main hook in the narrative in Peregrin is that humanity has fallen into ruin due to becoming reliant on an element that they believed could give them infinite lifespans. The main character is on a journey to repent to the gods as well as deal with her own grief. I think this set up is pretty good. Humanity loses sight of what it means to grieve through defeating death is a strong narrative hook for a story about how death and grieving is a neccessiary part of the human experience. The problem that Peregrin runs into is that that kind of story is one to be told subtly and Peregrin is about as subtle as a freight train. Characters speak at each other so bluntly that its impossible to miss any meaning and the narrator has a habit of outright saying how our main character is feeling rather than trusting us to work it out ourselves. This issue with the narrator extends to some gameplay as well as the writing has a habit of telling us about a grand view or a terrifying sight that the protagonist is seeing without actually showing it to us.
The gameplay itself is fairly bland as far as puzzle games go. The protagonist can mind control different types of animals, each having a unique single ability that they can use to solve different environmental puzzles. This isn't a bad set of mechanics to create puzzles with, but I never felt the puzzles were especially interesting or satisfyingly challenging. Most of my time spent on them wasn't spent thinking of a solution but waiting for the creatures to complete their tediously slow walk cycles. On more than one occasion I solved the current puzzle immediately but had to spend three minutes slowly moving the creatures from place to place. The game is also littered with small issues like poor signposting and buggy pathfinding
Peregrin has some good ideas, and the people who made it obviously have a great deal of talent but the concept is poorly executed and I don't think I'm ever going to come back to it.