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

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.

Extremely shallow and boring. Once again Tequilla works try to play the "allegory for grief" card and its getting stale and lazy. Even without being familiar with developers previous works you can feel that the setting is purely metaphorical because there is nothing to ground it, it is purely magical bullshit happening without any reason. Puzzles are braindead, if they can even qualify as puzzles. Movement is slow and annoying, because game insist on long climbing/platforming sections. Story happens only in the last 10% of the game, and the emotional ending doesnt feel earned, because there is nothing to connect it to the rest of the game. Very weak 3, only because the graphical presentation and music are very good.

This has been on my wishlist for a while without fully aware of what to expect. At first I expected to mostly play in the starting island with beautiful weather all the time. Kind of like a vacation experience. But the setting changed with every chapter (5 total). I was also initially unimpressed with the gameplay being mostly exploring, solving simple puzzles, climbing a la Tomb Raider/Uncharted and trying to understand the story without voice acting or a single text. It slowly won me over to the point of getting hooked and crying with the ending after completing the game a second time.

Positives:
-Gorgeous graphics and moving soundtrack
-Relaxing gameplay where time moves quickly without noticing
-Some of the puzzles are well thought out later in the game. What’s more, it strikes a fine balance of keeping interest while not being complicated for the most part
-Almost all the collectibles are meaningful additions to the story, they’re there for a reason
-Achievements (and collectibles) that enhance the joy of exploration (more on that later)
-Figuring out the story and how it’s an impressive accomplishment to be told so well despite the lack of words
-How every element comes together to create a game where the developers know what they want and they succeeded with their goals

Flaws:
-Animations can be odd sometimes when climbing or jumping down
-The graphics can have some minor visual bugs when you’re swimming underwater
-Very few collectibles/achievements are 100% impossible to figure out without a guide or pure luck
-The quality of the soundtrack is not very high. You don’t hear the music with full clarity, like there’s a minor muffle. But it might be just my headset
-The chapters are long, you can’t start from a different point in chapter select for specific collectibles/achievements
-The game needs time to grow on you and show you all it has to offer. You also need to go out of your way to put the pieces together. At a first glance you might think the game is boring and don’t understand the appeal because of this

The achievements are the star of the show. Aside from the story progression/collectibles, there are unique achievements that beg you to explore. Each achievement has unique icon and description. Those are especially effective after completing the game once. Because you will then vaguely remember what is being referenced and then you go there to confirm. It’s such a pleasant feeling when you get things right. The best way to play this game is at least a complete first run without looking things up. Just enjoy the game, try to find the secrets on your own and then look things up with chapter select. I did my first run completely blind, second run I mostly tried doing things on my own with some pointers/hints to send me in the right direction and then it was chapter select getting everything missed with a guide. The last step is not as bad as it sounds as the game saves the moment you find something. So you don’t have to complete a chapter or reach a checkpoint.

Even though I haven’t played games like Abzu and Journey yet, I think Rime is often compared with those games. I know that those games are more well known and popular. I’m guessing that Rime is not as good as those best games in the genre but it should definitely be played if you’re a fan of those type of games. Don’t play it if you’re planning on running quickly through it without giving the game the attention it deserves in terms of observation and thinking what you’re witnessing means.