A nice, good-looking first-person adventure game with a ton of optional puzzles that don't hold your hand. All the clues and puzzles are greatly varied and neatly integrated into the extensive environments, slowly uncovering a tangled web of characters, memories and intrigues in a small town.

For some reason, practically all puzzles are optional - in fact, you only need to solve a single one and just walk through the locations to finish the game. In fact-fact, you can skip an entire huge level out of the four available ones, so I guess you can have a pure cut-down walking simulator experience, but I wouldn't recommend it just for that. Both the inventory and clue saving systems are a bit whacky, so you better grab a notebook. There are also a couple of annoying puzzle bugs, so be prepared for the recurring 'Am I too bad at this or is it a bug?' meta game.

You might like this game if you liked the following (or vice versa!):
- Kona: A lone detective investigating a town's story during a supernatural blizzard - not as much puzzling, but more horror.
- The Occupation: A much more intricate world, a whole load of interactions and all of it in real-time. Made by the same devs.

You like pure puzzling? Then you'll probably like this. Not much else to say here, it's what it says on the label - disregard the 'Adventure' tag though, unless your bar for interesting narratives is very low.
A bunch of puzzles and another bunch of optional challenges make for a fairly long journey (if you want) through some pretty environments - you wouldn't wanna play this game just for the graphics or the bare-bones story though, so you can just try the first bunch of puzzles and see if you like it, because it'll stay that way with some new elements popping up every now and then.

If you like the visual style but not necessarily the gameplay, you might like RiME or The Witness instead. Maybe Etherborn, which has a similar lack of narrative.

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.

The sweetest game I've ever played. An adorable cast of characters, fun puzzles and a small world full of surprises - and you can hang out in the lounge to good music!
I genuinely love the dialogue (or… monologue, in some cases) which you'll encounter plenty of during your mission to make everyone smile.

You'll like this one if you're a fan of Cosmo D's games - it's a bit sillier.

PS: The artbook is cool, too!

The diorama style is well done and allows hidden object gameplay to emerge while not being annoying. In fact, the visuals are striking and would be a joy to look at, if the game allowed joy at any point. The narrative continues to simmer on low heat but never changes pace or even advances, unchangingly squirming in a dark place. It shows you another depressing piece of the puzzle, the protagonist says 'oh hey that's depressing' and that continues until the end. It does not even try to make the slope steeper. Maybe that's the intended structure, but it does not work.

A lot of conflicting things here, often seemingly stemming from the indie nature of this game. It's actually quite clever: Using your character for the enemies as well, reusing palace assets heavily while changing them a bit between each area and limiting the plot to two talking personalities, and it does not feel like these hinder the game in any way and elevate it instead.

As so often, the description of this game as an 'adventure' promises more than it keeps. The story segments get sparser while the bickering dialogue never resolves any tension, using the pattern 'what you're doing is dumb' - 'no' throughout.

The enemies replicating your actions - what a great idea! They change their routes and abilities, you change your strategy. But it's not clear how to approach it - pure stealth? run'n'gun'? A mix? Nothing feels right, it's all very scrappy. It's made worse by the two main objectives you encounter multiple times - 'collect X out of Y orbs' and 'collect the key(s) and open the door'. Doing each once or twice would have been fine to some extent, while the best passages are the ones where you have to find your way through an area. Just halfway through, wandering through the drought of meaningful story sections, and then being invited to collect 35 orbs is actually terrible.

The monotony is intensified by the palace design, which is understandable - having a poor person make four variations for each environment (besides simpler material and color changes) wouldn't have been worth the effort. It certainly tries to create uncanny environments with heavily repeated parts trailing off into the distance, but for some reason it doesn't click, except maybe during the mirrored sections towards the end.

I normally don't write this much, but seeing all the little pieces, anticipating how great they'll turn out and then each one turning out disappointing is a frustrating experience.