I'm gonna be real honest. This is probably one of the most frustrating and low payoff games I've ever played.
For starters, I think it's important for me to note that this is one of those 'millions of ways to die' games like The Witch's House. I haven't played that game, so I can't compare on who does it better. What's important here is that, thankfully, this game made that pretty obvious from the start. In return, I was constantly saving so that if I died from something stupid and unpredictable, I wouldn't be set back too far. This was my downfall.
There's a segment of the game about 20-30 minutes in where you have to choose one of two cups of tea to drink from. The correct one will allow you to pass through fire and the incorrect one... doesn't do anything. It doesn't kill you (this is not mentioned to the player beforehand, mind you). Well, I picked the incorrect one, because like with previous AND future puzzles in this game, the tea puzzle didn't make any sense. It's one of those 'both of these NPCs are telling the truth' logic puzzles, with a literal sign on the wall saying that neither of them are lying. Well it turns out they are lying! I found that out through a walkthrough I had to pull up because I had no idea what to do next. How you're supposed to figure that out, I don't know. I swear, I'm one of those check-everything people, especially in puzzle games like these. Well, maybe not in this game, because it taught me early on that checking everything can lead to you dying from things you didn't see coming! So I WASN'T checking absolutely everything so that I didn't keep having to reset. The REAL problem? You can't reset or undo the choice of tea you made. I saved over my choice, thinking I made the right decision (because I didn't immediately die like in so many other puzzles in this game) and in turn, I softlocked myself. 30 minutes in, now trapped in limbo. I ditched the game for the night and decided I'd try again the next day.
The next day was not much better. After going through the first quarter of the game again to get up to the tea room puzzle, I was pretty annoyed. It was honestly quite smooth sailing from there, give or take, up until this one room that involved a set of stairs and numbers being displayed in a grid in the space around it. The stairway is two rooms long, and each room has a 2x2 grid with numbers in it. I wrote down the numbers (in grid format) on a piece of paper and when I found the place they needed to be put in, I put them in. Now I know that grids can be read in a number of ways. Was I supposed to read them as two separate 2x2's, or one 4x2? Did the columns that stretched between rooms matter more than the rows? Whatever way I tried, I failed. I returned to my walkthrough, and as it turns out, for some reason, they expect you to be reading the numbers in reverse-backwards order, not even true backwards. So not like how you'd read a book (top to bottom, left to right) or like how you read a book backwards (bottom to top, right to left) but bottom to top, left to right. AND the second room comes first, for some reason. Like with the tea puzzle, how the player was supposed to know this, I'm not sure. Again, I wasn't checking absolutely everything in this area because I was tired of randomly dying, because the most random things will kill you out of nowhere, and that's what kind of game this is.
From that point on, I just played through the game with the walkthrough up, because I was genuinely only playing to be able to mark it as 'completed' on here.
In terms of the visuals and story, the variety of artstyles is incredibly cool and unique, and I think it has a very interesting and personal aesthetic that I haven't seen a whole lot in other games, and since it was made in 2015, it was doing the whole 'creepy eyeball pattern' thing long before 2020 Weirdcore happened.
However, cutscenes are atrocious, with character sprites popping in and out as the characters come and go, with dialogue prompts saying things like 'he walks out of the room' only for the character sprite to just disappear. Doing this instead of showing the character walking to the door is just pure laziness in my opinion. ESPECIALLY when you could've at the very least cut to black before removing the sprite. In fact, there's a lot of things that feel like laziness in this game, at least with minor things dialogue and presentation. For example, character talk portraits aren't always removed when action lines happen, so it makes it look like the character is saying the action line. Sprites aren't direction-corrected when entering/exiting warps, so the characters might be facing the wall instead of opposite the door they came from. The main warp hub is a set of massive TV screens, yet for some reason, only one tile out of the six or seven tiles that the each of the screens take up can be interacted with, and this specific tile isn't indicated in any way.
And as for the story... I don't know. It's fine, I guess. I sort of started skimming the dialogue as I got closer to the end of the game because of how frustrated I was. There were multiple cutscenes (including one where you have to wait for a timer to reach 0) I had to do multiple times because of the random dying and improper access to save spots.
One and a half stars for outstanding, incredible music and interesting environment design, but other than that, I'd say don't bother.
For starters, I think it's important for me to note that this is one of those 'millions of ways to die' games like The Witch's House. I haven't played that game, so I can't compare on who does it better. What's important here is that, thankfully, this game made that pretty obvious from the start. In return, I was constantly saving so that if I died from something stupid and unpredictable, I wouldn't be set back too far. This was my downfall.
There's a segment of the game about 20-30 minutes in where you have to choose one of two cups of tea to drink from. The correct one will allow you to pass through fire and the incorrect one... doesn't do anything. It doesn't kill you (this is not mentioned to the player beforehand, mind you). Well, I picked the incorrect one, because like with previous AND future puzzles in this game, the tea puzzle didn't make any sense. It's one of those 'both of these NPCs are telling the truth' logic puzzles, with a literal sign on the wall saying that neither of them are lying. Well it turns out they are lying! I found that out through a walkthrough I had to pull up because I had no idea what to do next. How you're supposed to figure that out, I don't know. I swear, I'm one of those check-everything people, especially in puzzle games like these. Well, maybe not in this game, because it taught me early on that checking everything can lead to you dying from things you didn't see coming! So I WASN'T checking absolutely everything so that I didn't keep having to reset. The REAL problem? You can't reset or undo the choice of tea you made. I saved over my choice, thinking I made the right decision (because I didn't immediately die like in so many other puzzles in this game) and in turn, I softlocked myself. 30 minutes in, now trapped in limbo. I ditched the game for the night and decided I'd try again the next day.
The next day was not much better. After going through the first quarter of the game again to get up to the tea room puzzle, I was pretty annoyed. It was honestly quite smooth sailing from there, give or take, up until this one room that involved a set of stairs and numbers being displayed in a grid in the space around it. The stairway is two rooms long, and each room has a 2x2 grid with numbers in it. I wrote down the numbers (in grid format) on a piece of paper and when I found the place they needed to be put in, I put them in. Now I know that grids can be read in a number of ways. Was I supposed to read them as two separate 2x2's, or one 4x2? Did the columns that stretched between rooms matter more than the rows? Whatever way I tried, I failed. I returned to my walkthrough, and as it turns out, for some reason, they expect you to be reading the numbers in reverse-backwards order, not even true backwards. So not like how you'd read a book (top to bottom, left to right) or like how you read a book backwards (bottom to top, right to left) but bottom to top, left to right. AND the second room comes first, for some reason. Like with the tea puzzle, how the player was supposed to know this, I'm not sure. Again, I wasn't checking absolutely everything in this area because I was tired of randomly dying, because the most random things will kill you out of nowhere, and that's what kind of game this is.
From that point on, I just played through the game with the walkthrough up, because I was genuinely only playing to be able to mark it as 'completed' on here.
In terms of the visuals and story, the variety of artstyles is incredibly cool and unique, and I think it has a very interesting and personal aesthetic that I haven't seen a whole lot in other games, and since it was made in 2015, it was doing the whole 'creepy eyeball pattern' thing long before 2020 Weirdcore happened.
However, cutscenes are atrocious, with character sprites popping in and out as the characters come and go, with dialogue prompts saying things like 'he walks out of the room' only for the character sprite to just disappear. Doing this instead of showing the character walking to the door is just pure laziness in my opinion. ESPECIALLY when you could've at the very least cut to black before removing the sprite. In fact, there's a lot of things that feel like laziness in this game, at least with minor things dialogue and presentation. For example, character talk portraits aren't always removed when action lines happen, so it makes it look like the character is saying the action line. Sprites aren't direction-corrected when entering/exiting warps, so the characters might be facing the wall instead of opposite the door they came from. The main warp hub is a set of massive TV screens, yet for some reason, only one tile out of the six or seven tiles that the each of the screens take up can be interacted with, and this specific tile isn't indicated in any way.
And as for the story... I don't know. It's fine, I guess. I sort of started skimming the dialogue as I got closer to the end of the game because of how frustrated I was. There were multiple cutscenes (including one where you have to wait for a timer to reach 0) I had to do multiple times because of the random dying and improper access to save spots.
One and a half stars for outstanding, incredible music and interesting environment design, but other than that, I'd say don't bother.