This is an okay short narrative game where the player finds out the disappearance of an AI that ushered a utopian era. The narrative is centered around this mystery and I think it was not intellectually or mechanically engaging. While the ending choice is a bit of a cliche, I did not feel it was explored well. Rather, the quirky interactions between the AI personalities is the strongest aspect of this game.

The gameplay suffers a bit with several context-based interactions that require waiting for audio to finish and most of them are not interesting to do. No strong puzzles or mechanics either to add variety and the inclusion of puzzle skips makes me sad. Since the narrative is not as strong, the lack of other supporting mechanics or systems makes this a weaker experience.

On a side note, I am disappointed that it uses Catholic concepts and centered around humanity given its cosmic scale feels lacking in a bit of narrative creativity. AI being somewhat gendered is okay but I was really disappointed it did not have non-binary representation. It ruined my immersion a bit where an AI controlling the masses is based on a heteronormative structure. This section is my preference so take this with a grain of salt.

This is an okay title but I do not have any strong reason to recommend it either.

Eu sou daquelas pessoas que adoram um bom jogo do estilo Walking Simulator e se forem daqueles que se completam numa tarde ainda melhor! Return to Grace encaixa nesses dois pontos e quando o comecei a jogar pensei mesmo que ia ser incrível, mas bem, não foi bem assim.

A narrativa tinha mesmo muito potencial para ser marcante e tem de positivo o facto de, ao contrário daquilo que é hábito, nos contar uma história em que a Inteligência Artificial não é a má da fita, mas a forma a história como se desenvolve é demasiado apressada e no final fica a sensação de que podia ter tido muito mais profundidade e, assim, ser mais cativante.

As escolhas que vamos fazendo têm o seu impacto no desenrolar desta pequena aventura e os puzzles que vamos encontrando, apesar de parcerem bastante forçados em certas alturas, são acessíveis e intuitivos.

A nível artístico, o jogo é competente mas nada por aí além – tem locais e momentos que agradam a vista, mas ao mesmo tempo existem outros que mereciam um pouquinho mais de detalhe.

Return To Grace faz parte daquele grupo de jogos de que eu queria imenso ter gostado e que ao inicio prometia muito, porém no final acabou por não convencer e ficar abaixo das expectativas

While Return to Grace is super short at around 2 hours long, I'm impressed by how much better it managed to be than a lot of other adventure games like it. It wasn't perfect, mind you, but it knew how to put its strength into where it counts.

While the developer's ambitions clearly outweighed the runtime they ended up with, those ambitions are clearly shown through some well-written dialogue, an interesting story concept, and some stellar visuals. I laughed more in the short time I spent with Return to Grace than I have in a lot of those five hour walking sims that stand similar to this, and was more interested in its story given its timeliness.

Ultimately though, the game isn't without its flaws. Besides the runtime issue, sound design is also lackluster. A lot of the game doesn't support either music or believable sounds which can properly detract from the immersion. As a consequence of that runtime, some of the game's more interesting concepts don't get the time to flourish either such as the branching paths toward your objective.

As an experiment though, it's clear that the dev should put more time into this style for a fuller experience. Return to Grace is a promising sign for their future, provided they can take the right lessons away from this adventure.

P.S. Screw Control. All my homies hate Control

I will start by saying Return to Grace isn’t great, but it is good. It’s a walking simulator that I know isn’t a genre that appeals to everyone, but it’s short and sweet with enough little bits of interactivity to keep the pace steady and not monotonous.

You take control of a future space archaeologist, Adie Ito, who’s ended up on Ganymede (one of Jupiter’s moons) at the resting place of Grace: an AI seemingly worshipped as a god.

Here there is no life left but you quickly discover a piece of Grace.
The first of which represents her logic processing and is quickly dubbed Logic as expected.
Throughout searching this retro-future facility you have different aspects of Grace come into existence all with distinct personality traits.
These characters (I guess technically character singular) are excellently presented, with a great variety of voice acting and all give different and interesting perspectives on what may have happened to Grace, her purpose and views on Adie herself.

Presentation isn’t just from great voice acting, Adie has a little computer mounted on her left wrist which is used for some puzzles but mostly shows simply differently expressive and coloured faces to represent each of these personalities you interact with.

Other interactions involve climbing, pulling levers, small button puzzles and a couple more interesting things that I don’t want to spoil from this game’s extremely short run-time.

Graphically the game is neat, smooth and shiny. Quality lighting and the aesthetic is somewhat 60’s sci-fi but with a good variety of interesting locals to keep you engaged.

If you enjoy walking simulators and especially if you have access to Game Pass this is worth a pick up.
It took me a little over two hours to get through and I did reload some saves to check out alternate choices which can end up with a couple of different endings.
Strangely Return to Grace is more full than you’d expect a two hour story to be in terms of little touches, variation of locations and characters but also feels fairly basic too.
It isn’t doing anything new or particularly innovative and the story is good but it’s a little predictable.
Return to Grace doesn’t feel like the clearly talented staff stretch out further than what they know they can do but while it means it doesn’t necessarily excite it does do everything to a level of quality that’ll not have you upset if you spent a couple of hours with it.

Um Walking Sim entre fraco e ok... Eu gosto do gênero e acho que tem exemplos ótimos por aí, mas esse não faz nada muito bem.

Return to Grace não apresenta nada mecanicamente interessante como Tacoma ou What Remains of Edith Finch...
A história que geralmente é o que mais prende em um bom Walking Sim, aqui também é meia boca, passa longe de um Firewatch e um Gone Home.
Os puzzles são para crianças de 3 anos parece.
Tampouco é uma experiência visual deslumbrante como Dear Esther ou Layers of Fear.

Game #15 of 2024 finished!

This is my type of walking sim! You get really compelling story with actually really enjoyable voice acting and puzzles to tie the whole thing together? Sign me up!

I am just a total pushover for anything space related and having to deal with human advancement/internal reflection though actions of people who came before. A real short, cute experience that through Game Pass made the whole experience feel worth the two hour runtime.

top 10 jogos que tu fica falando com robô / IA

A história é maneira e o jogo é bonitão, algumas partes eu parei só para ficar admirando.

Jogo massa demais, vale a pena pela jogatina curta!

Fantástico.
É um jogo tão direto, sem firulas, que não tem como largar.
Ele consegue a façanha de ser um jogo com diálogos sem pausas, mas que não te incomodam, pelo contrário, te conquistam.
As performances são muito boas, a direção de arte é maravilhosa, mas o destaque MESMO fica com a caneta, que não te deixa de saco cheio em nenhum momento.
Entrega muito pra quem não espera nada.

Se não suporta Walking Simulator melhor nem chegar perto. Se tiver a fim de uma experiência narrativa curta, não tem erro.
Surpresa muito positiva.

I thought this was fantastic. A bite sized walking sim with a solid story that reeled me in at just the right pace. It does that narrative thing I really like where they start the story basically in the middle, and the first half is getting caught up with where we even are and what we're doing. To me that makes for really fun storytelling because I like being given small clues and then time to guess at what they might mean. Ended up finishing the whole thing in one sitting!

Gameplay wise this is basically exploration and audio logs and that's it; normally this wouldn't appeal to me but Return to Grace has some fantastic voice acting backed up by strong, memorable characters. These have some obvious influences and there were some other pop culture references sprinkled throughout that I thought were great; they were thematically appropriate and felt like homages.

The slow walking speed is the biggest frustration, but it's kind of understandable since so much of the game is walking and talking that they don't want you blasting past like 3 scripted events while you're still listening to the first recording. But it really puts the damper on exploration and was a huge pain the one time I got turned around.

I can't stress enough what a big deal it is for me that the plot and worldbuilding are what drove me forward in this, because that's not usually what grabs me about games. The ideas presented were all pure, old-school, head-full-of-big-ideas science fiction and I was really impressed with the pacing and execution overall.

I've been to Canada a bunch of times and have friends there, so it warmed my heart to hear so many Canadian voices in one place. I suppose we should say thanks to the taxpayers of Ontario for this one as well, and yeah support the arts guys.