I am breaking my usual routine and writing this before completing Recursed, because I fear I will never be able to.
This is, undoubtedly, one of the hardest games I've ever played. I love puzzle games, and I consider myself good at them only by way of experience with the process of eliminating non-solutions, and not so much because of some incredible intuition. However, Recursed has taught me that the puzzle games that have given me that supposed level of skill all contain a common throughline of readily apparent logic. Recursed, by comparison, is the wild west, wholly unpredictable to me regardless of the time I commit to it.
Every room in the game is housed in a moveable chest, the default behavior of which is to reload its original state upon entry. The game begins with you establishing precarious routes through these rooms, solving mini-obstacles with clever item juggling and order of operations before landing yourself at the finish line. Then you might be asked what advantages are gained from a room that contains a chest of itself in it, or what happens if you submerge that chest in water before entry. Things get complex with this basic system quite fast.
But the midgame is where my brain started to crack. You are introduced to "enchanted" items, which are similar to Braid's green-highlighted objects in that they are impervious to your typical mechanics of instance-loading and repeated generation, instead persisting in their last laid location until moved (or accidentally deleted, should their housing chest be lost). In one level, you're meant to create an elaborate loop of rooms so that you can find yourself holding an enchanted chest while inside of it. Tunneling into it allows you to move your position throughout the room in unusual ways - throw the chest across a gap impossible to jump, then leave, and emerge from that location. It's brilliant, but not as brilliant as when you find yourself in a broken game state because you left the top-level enchanted room while simulataneously holding it, causing a paradox that sends you to an entirely new puzzle.
It's safe to say that without something like devotion, I doubt I will ever uncover all of the intricacies that Recursed holds. It is a game that taunts you with your lack of comprehension of space outside of our pitiful Euclidean existence, and I think ultimately it is the fact that it it such an unwilling teacher that holds it back from even greater acclaim. On levels with new concepts, a small ring can be found that triggers a Stephen Fry-alike doing a Winnie-the-Pooh "oh bother, what is this" routine, but never actually helping understand the constraints of the situation. Outside of occasionally insightful level titles, you're meant to discover things on your own through trial-and-error, and this in and of itself is reasonable, but not in conjunction with the lack of any sort of rewind feature. Later levels are larger time commitments with lengthy and complex setups, and a strict requirement for operational order can lead to simple mistakes that erase your work and force a reset. It is simply a chore to explore the full problem space, especially when you're trying to put the finishing touches on a half-solution.
Recursed is imposing and unhelpful, brash in its sheer difficulty and endless complications, but it houses one of the most stimulating, bewildering puzzle systems I've ever seen. Successes feel monumental, and sometimes the failures can be similarly astonishing in how they upend your assumptions. To be sent to the paradox world unexpectedly is a humbling feeling, and one that itself is worthy of experiencing. For all it's done to torture me, I maintain that Recursed deserves acclaim beyond its current repute. It is one of the modern greats in its field.
This is, undoubtedly, one of the hardest games I've ever played. I love puzzle games, and I consider myself good at them only by way of experience with the process of eliminating non-solutions, and not so much because of some incredible intuition. However, Recursed has taught me that the puzzle games that have given me that supposed level of skill all contain a common throughline of readily apparent logic. Recursed, by comparison, is the wild west, wholly unpredictable to me regardless of the time I commit to it.
Every room in the game is housed in a moveable chest, the default behavior of which is to reload its original state upon entry. The game begins with you establishing precarious routes through these rooms, solving mini-obstacles with clever item juggling and order of operations before landing yourself at the finish line. Then you might be asked what advantages are gained from a room that contains a chest of itself in it, or what happens if you submerge that chest in water before entry. Things get complex with this basic system quite fast.
But the midgame is where my brain started to crack. You are introduced to "enchanted" items, which are similar to Braid's green-highlighted objects in that they are impervious to your typical mechanics of instance-loading and repeated generation, instead persisting in their last laid location until moved (or accidentally deleted, should their housing chest be lost). In one level, you're meant to create an elaborate loop of rooms so that you can find yourself holding an enchanted chest while inside of it. Tunneling into it allows you to move your position throughout the room in unusual ways - throw the chest across a gap impossible to jump, then leave, and emerge from that location. It's brilliant, but not as brilliant as when you find yourself in a broken game state because you left the top-level enchanted room while simulataneously holding it, causing a paradox that sends you to an entirely new puzzle.
It's safe to say that without something like devotion, I doubt I will ever uncover all of the intricacies that Recursed holds. It is a game that taunts you with your lack of comprehension of space outside of our pitiful Euclidean existence, and I think ultimately it is the fact that it it such an unwilling teacher that holds it back from even greater acclaim. On levels with new concepts, a small ring can be found that triggers a Stephen Fry-alike doing a Winnie-the-Pooh "oh bother, what is this" routine, but never actually helping understand the constraints of the situation. Outside of occasionally insightful level titles, you're meant to discover things on your own through trial-and-error, and this in and of itself is reasonable, but not in conjunction with the lack of any sort of rewind feature. Later levels are larger time commitments with lengthy and complex setups, and a strict requirement for operational order can lead to simple mistakes that erase your work and force a reset. It is simply a chore to explore the full problem space, especially when you're trying to put the finishing touches on a half-solution.
Recursed is imposing and unhelpful, brash in its sheer difficulty and endless complications, but it houses one of the most stimulating, bewildering puzzle systems I've ever seen. Successes feel monumental, and sometimes the failures can be similarly astonishing in how they upend your assumptions. To be sent to the paradox world unexpectedly is a humbling feeling, and one that itself is worthy of experiencing. For all it's done to torture me, I maintain that Recursed deserves acclaim beyond its current repute. It is one of the modern greats in its field.