Sights & Sounds
- With all the crumbling ruins, magical animals, and puzzle elements strewn about, Rime manages to capture the look of Wii-era Zelda title (but with much smoother edges and twice the frames)
- I was also weirdly impressed by the skybox. That sounds weird to say, but it felt really nice to crawl out of the dank underground dungeon you've been puzzling your way through for 45 minutes and emerge into a lush meadow crowned with an expansive sea of blue or a rocky coast below a twilight sky beset with twinkling stars. Just a nice touch that helps the surprisingly small overworked feel bigger and realer than it should
- It feels like every game with wordless storytelling has a soundtrack full of keys and strings with a woodwind or percussion instrument occasionally dropping by to see what's going on. That isn't to say Rime's soundtrack isn't good (it's quite nice and features some beautiful vocal work), but you can look at the cover art and basically guess what it sounds like

Story & Vibes
- The entire game is a metaphorical journey through grief from the perspective of a young boy who's been shipwrecked on an island. Given the fact that there's only snippets of story and essentially no voice acting, you'd be excused for expecting environmental story telling. But there's not any. Rime is just one of those games with a two-sentence plot and a lot of puzzles
- That lack of exposition lends a mysterious air to the game that only lifts when you find a hidden keyhole, view a post-dungeon cutscene, or finish the game to see the ending sequence
- Speaking of the ending, be sure to get keep an eye out for collectibles as finding them all will net you a much better ending
- The narrative did kinda bother me. Not because it's low quality, but because it feels so disconnected from the gameplay

Playability & Replayability
- The world of Rime is a dense tangle of puzzles crammed into a 1-acre island. I enjoyed how very little space felt truly wasted. Every fork in the path and climbable surface feels like it leads to a new puzzle or collectible
- About a quarter of the way into the game, you'll reach the main puzzle hub: the giant tower that looms over the island and features prominently on the box art. I loved how the staircase progressively expanded to reveal new areas. It was gratifying to reach the end of the game and look down into the pool at the bottom. Little visual representations of progression like that always feel nice
- Controls are very straightforward; there's no combat, so don't go into the game expecting much beyond running, jumping, climbing, swimming, and the usual box pushing and relic carrying you'd expect from a puzzle game. You also have a button that makes you shout, but that's just how you activate magic items when you encounter them
- One gripe I have to raise involves the camera. It works fine most of the time, but it has a bad habit of zooming in far to closely in cramped spaces. It's hard to jump from one narrow stone column to another when half of the screen is covered by your character's model

Overall Impressions & Performance
- It took me a while to get to this review, and that was mostly because I was having a hard time deciding how much I liked the game. Every time I thought about bumping up the score, I kept remembering the weird disconnect between gameplay and narrative. It makes the story feel a little extraneous; the plot framing could be entirely replaced and the game would barely need to change. It's so strange that a game with such great presentation should feel so discordant and feature art direction and narrative that are so out of proportion with one another. If Rime's gameplay were a great white shark, the narrative would be a little remora nibbling bits of food from its teeth
- Rime ran very well on the Steam Deck, but I wound up wishing I had just hooked my laptop up to my TV to appreciate the art a little more

Final Verdict
- 7/10. I'd still recommend Rime to anyone who loves a good Zelda-like puzzle title, but not very enthusiastically. Don't get me wrong--it has plenty of virtues. The price feels fair for the content (unlike The Pathless, a similar title). But the story reveal at the end made me wonder why I had bothered solving puzzles for 8 hours. It's a bit long-winded for a metaphor

Rime cuenta un tipo de historia con un tipo de gameplay muy manido por juegos indies. Es un juego sencillo de jugar, preciosista en lo visual y en lo auditivo que al final del día no cuenta nada especialmente nuevo, pero sin embargo (en mi caso concreto al menos), logra emocionar (que al final, es lo que más pretende). A pesar de lo manido de sus temas, el final sorprende y recontextualiza el juego, pasando de ser "otro más" a ser un juego que se siente honesto y bastante congruente con los tropos de este pseudo-sub-género dentro de los indies: la sencillez de sus mecánicas y lo preciosista de su apartado audiovisual funcionan, pues esta es una historia sencilla, infantil, que en parte habla de la negación al dolor, que aunque trate temas amargos, se ve concebida como un cuento infantil, como una leyenda del mar que acaba siendo un pequeño canto a la vida y a aquello que podemos perder. Me ocurrió (aunque menos) con GRIS y me vuelve a ocurrir aquí: aunque puedo entender las críticas a estos juegos, pues estos intentan tratar temas como la pérdida o la depresión pero sin embargo solo se aventuran a explorar esto bajo formas bonitas y aceptadas por la industria (vamos, que prioriza lo "bello" sobre la expresión y sus temas), esta apuesta por mostrar "lo bonito" se me acaba antojando como una reinvidicación, como una forma de decir que valoremos lo bonito que tiene este mundo. Puede que Rime sea "otro de esos juegos" y puede que mi analisis peque de emocionalidad; no voy a negar que Rime no es un juego excelente, pero yo que sé, me da igual. Lo he disfrutado mucho.

Much like The Witness and Talos Principle, RiME is another one of those puzzle island games wherein an unnamed protagonist explores an isle full of, well, puzzles. Unlike those titles, however, this is an immensely linear journey: 90% of the obstacles encountered are in a specific order, the few divergent ones indifferent from their brethren. Unfortunately, as you’ve no doubt heard, all these enigmas, regardless of their placement, are pretty easy to solve, so the question is, is it still worth an endeavor? I would say so, but only for those individuals looking to share a gaming experience with their younger kinsfolk.

See, I’ve never been against perspicuous video games because newer players are born every second and warrant better products than your usual edutainment release. Sure, if you’re older you won’t find much excitement, but, rather than criticize the developer, it’s better to view yourself as outside the target audience. The thing I appreciate about RiME is, yes these are simple puzzles involving such timeless classics as align the stars and the wolf/goat/cabbage problem, however they never feel brainless the way Observation’s did. There was clear effort put into the placement of units, meaning they don’t come across as rehashed conundrums copy/pasted for the sake of padding. And considering the lack of dialogue, it honestly wasn’t a bad idea to go the easy-breezy route; have the player figure things out on their own, even if that entails streamlining the overall enterprise.

Really, the larger gameplay problem is the pointless free roam. As I stated earlier, this is a relatively straightforward experience- you’re constantly going from A to B with little deviation, which in turn necessitates a lot of running, and I have to wonder what the point if it all was. Why bother constructing such a large setting? Why not make it level-based, with shorter compressed stages, as opposed to the current model wherein I’m spending a third of my time prancing about? I get the appeal of open worlds, believe me I do: the far horizons, large open playpens, and inherent sense of wonder. But not every game warrants having one, and I feel RiME falters in its adoption of this schematic. This is a game that would’ve been better off divvying its 5 areas into large-scale dungeons akin to the Zelda series. As it stands, your boy jogs fast enough to prevent frustration, though I can’t promise you won’t exhibit any whilst aimlessly meandering across the map again and again and again.

Speaking of Zelda, fans of the latest three entries (Skyward Sword, BOTW, and now TOTK) will probably undergo deja vu upon seeing the water colours and soft cell-shading on display, and just as it was serene in those games, so it is here. Seriously, for all its gameplay flaws, RiME has a very calming atmosphere, and a large chunk of that has to do with the soluble-looking aesthetics. Most surfaces are comprised of one or two hues, giving a sense of familiarity no matter the biome shifts or abnormal NPCs; whether you’re ambling in the rain with automatons or dodging a crazed elephantine bird, there’s never a sense of displacement- you know you’re in the same plane with the same geometry and rules.

That said, some shortcomings do exist in spite of the homely habitations, beginning with the lighting. RiME implements a baked overlay that generally works fine until you step inside an enclosed space- once inside, things become a bit too dark, making pathfinding slightly difficult. Additionally, the developers have included a lot of pools and waterways, yet abstained from coding any kind of liquid effect on your protagonist: emerging from a lake or standing under a spout matters not as there are no dampened variations inputted onto his physique, nor droplets cascading from his linen. Nothing. Lastly, I was displeased with the game’s rendition of fire and smoke: the former resemble lava lamp gloops over flames, while the latter are overly flat, bringing to mind the fume drawings from older 2D animated films like Hercules and Sinbad (gorgeous there, but out-of-place in RiME’s 3D world).

Overall, though, there’s no denying the soothing atmosphere generated from the visuals, a facet further aided by David García Díaz’s wondrous score. His orchestrations easily brought to mind the late great James Horner’s classic compositions from the 90s wherein he would indulge in sweeping overtures to match the epic situations on screen (Braveheart, Titanic, Balto, etc….). When the pace dies down, his OST dials back accordingly, switching to soft keyboard and stringed notes that never let you forget their existence. Truly majestic.

Sound effects, on the other hand, are only sufficient- great designs like the clang of orbs, cawing of birds, and growling of those aforementioned robots are counterposed by the absence of wind, inexistence of lizard pattering, and repetitive barking from your fox companion that sounds more like a corgi. Footsteps are also a bit muffled, though I suppose this makes sense given that you are wearing wood sandals.

Voice acting is reduced to ineligible noises emitted by the Boy- 9 times out of 10, he’ll simply yell to activate a puzzle statue, but during the quieter moments he’ll instead hum a melody that recalled Red’s singing from Transistor (in other words, it’s nice). There are a few instances where the VA (Mirella Diez Moran) is tasked with emitting scared and angry emotions, and he succeeds in doing so despite the cap placed on his vocabulary. As a result, I have no qualms placing the Kid among the other great muted protagonists of video game lore like Yara and Link (from SS).

The drawback to removing all communications, of course, is that the narrative is inherently hit with junctures of confusion. You can glean all you want from the environmental storytelling (numerous cave paintings do adorn the walls), but in the end it’s all metaphorical and privy to player interpretation, for better and for worse. Still, the clearer beats are depicted more directly, and the ending is a giant curveball, remaking your past excursions with a heart-wrenching glaze that genuinely moved me. While you ultimately won’t be playing the game for the story, this is one of the few times where a minimalist approach was actually executed well.

In the end, I reiterate my initial assertion that RiME is a game for parents searching for something to play with their kids, or older siblings with their younger kin. It’s a serviceable adventure with a colorful world, fair story, and puzzles that aren’t condescending. All other parties look elsewhere.


Notes
-Every puddle and gold metal surface, regardless of size, has reflective properties, allowing you to see a smeared likeness of your character. Pretty dang cool.

-Don’t know why they included a roll function -- it doesn’t move you any quicker and doesn’t serve any puzzle purpose.

-The Boy has been programmed with some pretty well-done facial animations. It’s too bad you won’t see them unless you deliberately turn the camera.

-There’s a weird chinking sound every two or so times you hop. I’m assuming it was an attempted foley for some paraphernalia on the kid, but the noise has that repulsive misophonic quality you get from scraping ice off the side of a freezer.

Essentially a Team ICO game sapped of all the masterful storytelling, intricate world-building and indelible sense of adventure that one would expect from a game directed by Ueda. RiME is incredibly vague in regards to what the story is actually about until the last ten minutes, in which it attempts to deliver an emotional bomb that feels more like a popped zit. It's too little too late, and everything prior to the ending is a meandering borefest with no sense of narrative purpose.

Points for at least trying to replicate the master though.

The fox imagery at the end made me cry.
So far this and Portal 2 are the only videogames that have made me cry, I don't know what that says about me.

Incredibly simple but clever storytelling, though the length of the individual chapters does hinder it. The ending is honestly fantastic and goes so well with the slightly eerie feeling of being watched that permeates through the entire first half of the game.
If this was 1-2 hours shorter it would've honestly been a 5 star game, but as it stands the length holds it back ever so slightly.

shit gamefeel
why have collectible on a linear game??
what's with all the dark places where you can't see shit
dumb puzzles
too repetitive
couldn't finish, stopped at the dinosaur