I found I got the most enjoyment out of this when I treated it like a sudoku or wordle, picking it up once a day or so for a short session, a good way to stretch the brain. As you progress the game increases in difficulty and you unlock new tools which expand the puzzles into new directions. Then there are a few tile based Tetris-shape puzzles to unlock doors and a couple of secrets.
To motivate you through all this is a mystery: are you a person? An android? Both? Why are you here? Who is the mysterious god like voice and what does he want? Is any of this real? What happened? It’s all vague and open, initially intriguing. To piece that together you must get to the end, piecing together clues here and there from computer monitors providing text logs. These are what lets the game down to be honest. There’s a lot of them. They are drip fed to you regularly as pages and pages of text. Some deal with history, philosophy, AI programming, fictional(?) writers flexing their song writing abilities. Some of these are surely meant to hint at the big mystery, and point towards the game’s heavy themes, others are entirely fluff, but you’d have a hard time telling which with some. The combination of these and the huge number of puzzles leaves it feeling overstretched.
There are a tier of more difficult puzzles as well. You know when you find these as they’re marked with a red block reward. At first they seem impossible. There’s a ‘notice board’ of sorts in the area for you to ask for assistance, but you’re told you can’t get that until you find their secret. When you do, it turns out you have a limited number of these requests, and they don’t actually make a difference besides giving you a text clue in one of these puzzles. After the fun of unlocking new tools and toys earlier, this was a bit of a let down. I did then find that even without these hints, I was able to solve a lot of the puzzles on my own. Perhaps the experience had trained me, improved my brain, updated my firmware? That was nice. I just would have liked a steadier, more concise narrative.
To motivate you through all this is a mystery: are you a person? An android? Both? Why are you here? Who is the mysterious god like voice and what does he want? Is any of this real? What happened? It’s all vague and open, initially intriguing. To piece that together you must get to the end, piecing together clues here and there from computer monitors providing text logs. These are what lets the game down to be honest. There’s a lot of them. They are drip fed to you regularly as pages and pages of text. Some deal with history, philosophy, AI programming, fictional(?) writers flexing their song writing abilities. Some of these are surely meant to hint at the big mystery, and point towards the game’s heavy themes, others are entirely fluff, but you’d have a hard time telling which with some. The combination of these and the huge number of puzzles leaves it feeling overstretched.
There are a tier of more difficult puzzles as well. You know when you find these as they’re marked with a red block reward. At first they seem impossible. There’s a ‘notice board’ of sorts in the area for you to ask for assistance, but you’re told you can’t get that until you find their secret. When you do, it turns out you have a limited number of these requests, and they don’t actually make a difference besides giving you a text clue in one of these puzzles. After the fun of unlocking new tools and toys earlier, this was a bit of a let down. I did then find that even without these hints, I was able to solve a lot of the puzzles on my own. Perhaps the experience had trained me, improved my brain, updated my firmware? That was nice. I just would have liked a steadier, more concise narrative.