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
- 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