This game starts a little slow, but I have really grown to enjoy it. The puzzles are hard, yet enjoyable because their difficulty is enough to make you struggle, but there is nothing that is impossible to do without a tutorial. The story also turns out to be fun and the graphics are great.

I have finished the game in 14:12:08 , but there are also DLC which I initially didn't plan to play, but now I will. I will add all the playtimes for the review after completion.

Nice. The Aegir Gig DLC does not show playtime, so I guess I will not be updating the time. As for the DLC content, the challenges are much more advanced. To the point where the solutions feel cheezy, actually, but I liked it. Once again, it is cool that you can figure out all of them yourself. I did learn a few tricks from the walkthrough, but I didn't use it to cheat, I just was curious what was the intended way of solving some puzzles.

Aaand, the Ice Queen DLC is pretty nice as well. New mechanics are cool, but I think the difficulty level is at the limit of possible...

Play this only if you want a lot of puzzles and don't need a story. Pretty graphics though!

The story segments are way too sparse and too uninteresting to keep playing for them, but if you want to witness the possibly worst death lamentation scene I've ever seen, be my guest.
Put on a podcast or a video instead of listening to the dialogue written with a constant sass level so high that it makes you think you're reading a political twitter thread. Though that feeling suddenly likes to flip-flop, becoming dramatic at times and then venturing into (intended) comedy, which is pretty strange.

The puzzles play well and while they're complex, they're actually pretty straightforward - I didn't have to use a walkthrough a single time which is very uncommon (yeah I'm bad at vidya).

If you're interested in more story focus (and frankly, a better story) and fewer puzzles, get The Turing Test or The Spectrum Retreat instead. Maybe even QUBE 1 & 2.

Relicta offers quality though derivative puzzles (they're nothing you haven't already more or less seen in the likes of Talos Principle or Magrunner: Dark Pulse): polarize or alter the gravity of cubes so they attract or repel each other, in order to reach buttons that shut down forcefields, or ride a zero-G cube up a shaft while using polarity points to steer your flight path, it's that kind of thing. It's clever stuff, though unfortunately hindered by a considerable amount of RNG: while a degree of randomness is usually to be expected from physics-based puzzles, this game crossed the line into pure frustration when you realize you are doing the right thing but your cubes were just a couple pixels too far to the side, denying the intended result by not floating in the very specific direction required, or brushing against a piece of scenery, forcing you to try again. It doesn't help that many times you will be required to avoid snapping your cube to a polarity pad, rather to approximatively angle it to loosely be influenced by a polarity field, which, combined with the absolute precision required in spots, adds too many variables for its own good.

There are also several instances in which a glitch or a cube getting stuck in an unreachable place will force a restart of an entire map, which can mean throwing upwards to a half hour or more of progress in the bin. The game does a decent enough job to avoid this most of the time, but there are definitely areas that were overlooked in that regard. It also does a really poor job of following its own rules (all barriers have invisible walls over them to prevent them being jumped over, until they suddenty don't) and explaining new mechanics as they are introduced, leaving the player stranded for a long time until they finally notice the new element that the game neglected to point out. A perfect example is how for many hours the game uses drones with depolarizing fields that can't be turned off... until they can (the difference between the two types being a barely noticeable colored stripe), and the room that explains this was placed after a complex puzzle that requires that knowledge. The same goes for when moving platforms sneakily start to have polarized points underneath them after hours of not having them.

However, what really sets Relicta apart in a negative way from other similar games in this genre is the story, both in how abundant and how annoying it is. Aside from the "women good, men bad" slant of the entire thing, which is down to personal preference and might be more palatable to those who welcome the intrusion of such commentary in their puzzle game, the writing and the voice acting are absolutely subpar: it's hard to pin whether it's due to plain acting incompetence or the British-Indian accents of most actors not being particularly conducive to expressiveness, but every line comes off as sounding absolutely flat and monotone, regardless of urgency or state of mind. It doesn't matter whether the three main women are arguing, planning, exchanging mother-daughter dialogue, spouting passive aggressive venom at each other or attempting a (painfully unfunny) humorous quip, they always sound almost exactly the same, and that is like a mildly irritated person trying to speak to a manager at a clothing store. You will always walk into a new area and be subjected to a minute or more of lame banter while you're trying to think about the puzzles.

Thankfully the cutscenes are all skippable and you can always turn voice volume down to zero to never hear any of the in-game dialogue in order to experience the puzzles with minimal interruption. It's a shame that even these, quality as they are, aren't quite up to snuff with other similar games due to the erraticness of the physics model.

It's still well worth playing for fans of the genre, and there is a lot of content on offer, since the base game is easily 12 to 15 hours long and as of writing this comes with two sizeable free DLC packs amounting to about 5 or 6 extra hours of play time (and, sadly, story) but the frustration factor of getting stuck through no fault of your own can be a deal breaker for many.

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.

Estamos ante un juego ambicioso con una excelente premisa y una mecánica bastante compleja que desafortunadamente no logra cumplir su cometido. Relicta es un juego enfocado en puzles que giran alrededor de las físicas y un trabajo de diseño de niveles bastante ejemplar y más intrincado de lo que parece en un principio. Lo experimentamos a través de los ojos de una científica que debe superar una enorme cantidad de pruebas enfocadas en el desarrollo de herramientas tecnológicas que giran en torno al magnetismo. Este desarrollo tecnológico se debe al descubrimiento de un extraño artefacto que a medida que avanza la historia, termina no siendo lo que parece. El hecho de que un título de este tipo se tome la molestia de crear una historia en torno a una sola mecánica de juego es bastante osado, lamentablemente y aunque la trama es lo suficientemente interesante como para querer seguir avanzando, la actuación de voz se siente bastante forzada y poco natural, lo que termina por sacarnos de la suspensión de la incredulidad. Las gráficas son sobresalientes y el diseño de niveles es perfecto para lo que se requiere, inclusive hay uno que otro coleccionable que añade un poco más de variedad a todo este asunto de resolver acertijos con magnetismo. La forma de resolver cada nivel va a aumentando exponencialmente en dificultad, y algunos de los niveles finales del juego más que ofrecernos un desafío digno se sienten como una carga. Lo normal es sentirse realizado por encontrar la forma de avanzar en un videojuego de este estilo, pero en Relicta se siente más como un alivio que cualquier otra cosa. Es un juego que no recomendaría a nadie, porque, aunque su historia sea buena, sus niveles ingeniosos y sus mecánicas bien elaboradas, avanzar se siente más como un trabajo que como un logro.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/03/14/relicta-2020-pc-ps4-xbone-stadia-review/

The game is set in 2120 aboard a station on the moon where an artifact known as the Relicta has been discovered, and scientific experiments are being done in secret to discover what properties it holds. You play as Dr. Angelica Patel – a physicist on the Chandara base, who is testing a new device that allows the use to manipulate gravity and magnetism.

The moon base is soon involved in an accident involving the Relicta, separating all of the members of the crew, including Kira, Angelica’s daughter. Angelica finds herself having to save the rest of the crew at the base, all while having to worry about the Relica and the secrets that it holds.

There is quite a bit of story here that I can’t include here, but I don’t want to ruin a lot of it by revealing too much, but just be warned that this is a dialogue heavy puzzle game.

Relicta is a first-person physics-based puzzle game where the main gameplay mechanic is using magnetism and gravity to solve all of it’s puzzles. While Relicta is obviously a portal clone, there are also comparisons that can be made to Magrunner: Dark Pulse, which also heavily uses magnets for it’s puzzles and is another Portal clone. But Relicta is more involved with it’s magnetic puzzles.

The puzzles of Relicta focus around magnetic cubes where you can switch between a negative and positive charge, indicated by them turning either red or blue, or having no charge at all, which is controlled with the gloves that your character has as part of her suit.

Puzzles contain the obvious game mechanics, such as making the cubes attract or repel each other, and using them on pressure plates to open up doors or turn off conveniently colored energy fields, purple only allowing the player to go through, green only allowing cubes, and yellow preventing both from coming through.

But like I mentioned earlier, the cubes have an anti-gravity field too. Sometimes you’ll have to use the cubes to activate a button that is located on a wall or the ceiling, or guide them through a level using magnetic places located on walls, some of which you can change yourself, and even ride them to get to the location that you need to be at.

Unfortunately, there were a few times where I was stuck solving a puzzle, only to find out that the game had introduced a new mechanic that I had no idea was there and I had to eventually cave in and look up a walkthrough just to figure out what I had to do. After that, the puzzles weren’t too bad, it’s just the initial not knowing what to do that was frustrating.

This makes the game more tedious that it should be. Some sort of audio cue indicating what I should do would have been helpful, whether it something coming from what I’m supposed to be paying attention to, or have my character briefly mention something after a while of being stuck in a certain area. I had no clue what the game wanted me to look at, and it took me way too long to figure out a piece of the puzzle.

There were even a few instances where I was looking for one of the magnetic boxes required to finish a puzzle only to find out that it was somewhere that I didn’t think to look. Some slight telegraphing would have significantly improved this game.

Also, the length in between autosaves is a little too long. There have been times where I was half way through a puzzle, had to close the game for whatever reason, and come back to it and have to spend 5 minutes catching up to where I was last just so I could continue. Even if the game didn’t include more autosaves, I would have loved the option for a manual save, but I don’t know if there was a technical reason it couldn’t have been included or it was just the way that the developers designed the game.

These few minor changes would have made the game a much smoother experience.

Also, some of the dialogue is a bit awkward, such as one character calling another an “Orbi-Boomer” and having sarcasm for every other line, for at least the first half of the game, or having PDAs and dialogue filled with references to other media. The game is aware of the kind of story that it wrote for itself in the latter half, It gets a little tedious after awhile, especially with how self-aware it is.

The visuals are pretty solid, even it’s pretty obvious that areas are designed to be more like rooms than actual locations. It is nice to see off into the distance beyond the areas that you’re in and seeing some nice looking locations, which there is a variety off.

As you’re solving puzzles and trying to figure out what is going on, you have to move in between domes, which contain a range of biomes of Earth-based terrains, which range from a large dense forest and nice blue sky, to snowy wasteland with icy caves, and even a seemingly endless desert. This does a lot to separate itself from something like Portal, instead of having dull tech filled room after room, you have another vista to look at, which is only separated by a few moments of the sci-fi aesthetic of a moon base.

The games visuals are so nice that it comes with a photo mode, where you can take photos of the surrounding environment, and the photo mode comes with Instagram like filters, so you can have fun customizing your pictures to your hearts content. This is one of those features that you wonder why it isn’t in more games with nice looking art styles and graphics.

Relicta is quite a lengthy game, and I feel like that being a good or a bad thing is going to be up to the player. Some might want more of the game, but there just wasn’t enough variety in the gameplay and by the end of the game I was getting a little exhausted. If you’re going to play, maybe take a few breaks while playing and go do something else.

Despite a lot of my complaints with Relicta and the fact that it’s not a game that I would go immediately to with recommending first person puzzle games, there is still something to be enjoyed here. And anyone who is looking for their fix of something that only a Portal-like game can fill, it’s certainly worth checking out, but unfortunately, it’s a lukewarm recommendation from me.

Despite my negativity, I would like to see it’s developer ‘Mighty Polygon’ continue just to see something more polished from them.