Relicta is an okay puzzle game similar to Portal. You play as a scientist investigating an anomaly with a power source your team discovers that results in an alien intelligence infecting you. While looking into the cause of the issues on the moon base you work on, you must complete button puzzles using cubes and a telekinesis to traverse the various biomes on the station.

I lost interest in the story pretty quickly as the dialogue felt aggressive and poorly written. Nearly every sentence has curses that made me get annoyed as it isn't a dialogue that felt natural. The world building is hidden in collectables but even the text articles and transcripts felt boring to me.

I completed the game with both endings viewed but left the speedrun achievement and all of the DLC for a future date.

Relicta isn't particularly novel but it's a solid puzzle game that's fun to figure out. The puzzles are mainly focused of magnetism and gravity but they do a good job of layering in new mechanics and complexity gradually that gives you a nice learning curve. The new mechanics they introduce in every new segment aren't that mind boggling. It's mostly stuff like switches you can press or robots that can carry boxes but it's enough to make you have to think how to tackle a new obstacle. I shouldn't hold this against Relicta specifically but I did find myself noting just how many puzzle games are about moving boxes around. I do understand that you need an easy visual means of communicating your puzzles especially if you want any sort of difficulty to it but damn, putting boxes onto switches is something we just can't get away from in video games. I didn't find myself interested in the story this game was telling on its terraformed moon but there is clearly some effort put into the environmetal story-telling and voice acting. This game comes with two free DLCs and the second one, Ice Queen, was probably my favourite stuff in the game adding a couple new mechanics and a more entertaining protagonist.