Un juego absorbente y amenazador, adelantado a su tiempo y al mismo tiempo extremadamente deudor de su época. Firme heredero de los juego-puzzles hechos durante la eclosión indie como AntiChamber (en sí, descendientes de Portal), NaissanceE aporta ofuscación y completo minimalismo para dejarte sólo con las sensaciones. El resultado es excelente, y realmente no tendría nada más que añadir salvo, quizá, un final un poco menos abrupto.

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An absorbing and enticing game, ahead of its time and at the same time extremely of its time. As an offshoot of the puzzle games boom made during the indie era ala AntiChamber (which came directly from Portal), NaissanceE brings obfuscation and minimalism so that you may just bask in sensation. The results are excellent, and the only thing I'd say is that this needed a slightly less abrupt ending.

making your way through spaces of angular, alien structures. levels alternate between cramped, even claustrophobic moments and wide open areas with an epic sense of scale. not exactly a "walking sim" because the "making your way through" involves a consistent rhythm of puzzle platforming that's not highly difficult, but nontrivial enough that i could see people getting stuck or frustrated at points. moreover i wouldn't say the platforming and movement "feel good" in a way that you'd typically hope a platformer to feel, so even if almost all the sections in the end only took a handful of tries at worst, it often felt a bit painstaking, which might well be the intention. the way this game's level design unfolds, and the way the levels play with your perception of light as you try to progress, and especially the way the levels play with your perception in more extreme ways as the finale gives way to intense psychedelia, is unlike anything else i've experienced in a game. the ambient electronic music is what really seals the immersion though. i don't think its an overstatement that even with the beauty of the game's architecture, it'd be in a lot greater danger of becoming a slog without the music. so many points here where as soon as it really kicked in i felt so much more keyed into the play process.

might be one of my favorite ~walking sim esque games in terms of atmosphere and aesthetics.

attempts at implementing more actual gameplay were a mixed bag. some of it was rancid (mainly the platforming) but elsewhere (more involved puzzles) it was really cool.

surprisingly frightening in a few spots. there's never any real danger outside of a handful of spots but it sure as hell felt like there was all the same.

glad to have experienced it.

This game is... very pretentious, but it's absolutely my kinda thing. The closest thing I could compare it to would be Scorn; you spend your time exploring this vast, uncaring and alien landscape and, while there are occasional puzzles or platforming sections, the main reason you are here is just to drink it all in. Again like Scorn there is no real story to grasp on to, it's more about vibes and a nonspecific sense of dread, and the experience comes off more as an art exhibit than a video game (see also Yume Nikki and, for a bad example, Agony). In my experience games like this can feel a little aimless or content-poor in terms of actual gameplay challenge, and I get why many would find this boring... but it turns out these kinda of game are absolutely my kind of shit.

Naissance is absolutely beautiful and, despite basically nothing happening in the whole game, utterly terrifying. The use of massive scale, harsh lighting and pitch blackness make you feel like an insignificant mote of dust drifting through a world that wasn't made for you, doesn't care about you and mostly doesn't even realise you exist. The use of darkness in particular is very bold... parts of this game are so dark that it's extremely difficult to see anything, which sounds like terrible design on paper, but it really hammers home the feeling that this is not a world that was built for you to explore. Later on in the game it feels like the world 'notices' you somehow and begins to fuck with the player character more directly and... well, it lost me a bit there, and I much preferred the feeling of loneliness and lostness that came in the earlier part of the game.

Overall, though, I did find this game weaker than Scorn. The art direction in NaissanceE is, don't get me wrong, austerely beautiful... breathtaking, in fact. But it just can't compete with the overwhelming detail of the world in Scorn. There are also a few parts of NaissanceE where it opens up into a quasi-open world, and honestly these feel pretty aimless (and not the good 'aimlessness' of the explorative parts of the game). The area I'm going to refer to as 'the Desert' is the worst example of this; just a huge area with a few random points of interest in it. Each of those landmarks is interesting in its own way, but they all come across as just randomly placed set pieces that were dumped here because the devs couldn't figure out where to put them. Also... yeah, won't lie, that ending made me roll my eyes pretty hard.

Still, the overall experience I had with NaissanceE was a strong one. I particularly liked the more maze-like areas where it felt like there were dozens of different paths you could take; I'm sure that video game magic ensures you get to where you need to go anyway, but the illusion of choice really helped sell this game as an exploration of an unfathomably large place in a way that few other games can. Definitely recommend trying it if it's your kind of thing (it's free!), but do be prepared to bounce off as this is definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

For a god-like all-knowing powerful being, the puzzles it throws at you are a really pitiful attempt at stopping you... Something ludonarrative dissonance something something.

I was enjoying the game whenever it let you explore (specially those sections that give you the illusion of an open world), that's where the dev's world design shines (great atmosphere for what is a minimal style), that's accompanied by some interesting moments of subtle world building or quirky interactions. But sadly ruined by mundane puzzles and clunky platforming sections that take away from the experience. Also, what's the point of the breathing mechanic? You use it for like 10% of the game, and it practically only exists to distract and not let you immerse yourself. Maybe the devs should've stuck to the premise of it being an "artistic experience" and not a game, even though it sounds pretentious as hell in the steam description. Anyway, I don't want to rip too much into this game since it's free, and the most offensive thing it does is being amateurish... Overall, a decent short game. Discovered "BLAME!" thanks to it too, so I'll probably go right ahead and read that.

(Oh, if you have a monitor with an energy saving feature that turns it off whenever the screen is black, turn that off before playing because the game's really dark, and lifting the gamma to max on the settings seemingly doesn't help lol.)

esse jogo chegou no meu radar e por ser de graça fui jogar, e sinceramente não é um jogo,é uma obra de arte interativa.

a unica coisa que você faz é andar,não tem historia nem nada,voce só aprecia esse complexo de arquitetura meio Surrealista e Meio Maneirista de uma maneira tão bela e te deixando pensando se isso existe pra qual motivo.

É Arte, e como arte eu me nego a dar menos de 5 estrelas,é uma otima experiencia as musicas,todo o clima, porem se você tem Megalofobia (eu tenho) talvez algumas coisas batem errado em ti. mas acho que isso que faz parte da arte,
triste por não ter conhecido antes e feliz por finalmente ter conhecido isso agora

pro tip for playing this game:
at the beginning after the intro cutscene CLOSE YOUR EYES
this is to avoid the single line of worldbuilding at the beginning of the game that has absolutely no effect or impact on the rest of the game
you don't actually have to do this just that honestly i don't understand the point of the line

i was googling some stuff after i finished the game and i found a reddit post called "NaissanceE and games that are hostile to the player."
the review is actually a bit positive and an interesting read but at the end of the review the author ponders how all the negative and frustrating aspects of the game combined with the visual and auditory experience have combined to create a game the author enjoyed

well i believe i know exactly how that happened
pure luck!
i have a personal belief that the developer of this game created an outline consisting of "okay the player is this and they are here" and then proceeded to just add a bunch of random shit until they had enough for the game
combine that with a healthy dose of hurt-your-eyes visuals (i fucking HATE film grain in video games) and some music that ranges from "oh this is setting the mood here" to "ow" and you've got the perfect game to make people think there's a deeper message
is there a deeper message? maybe!
is this game more of just a showcase of malevolent architecture combined with "living" architecture? yes!
were the slugs oddly endearing? a little bit!

in this way i don't think the game was intending to be "hostile" towards the player, more so that the developer put things in the game with the idea that they would add to the showcase, rather than add to the game
this in turn makes the game actually pretty easy because in most cases a showcase is just something to look at, not really anything to interact with
most of the game is just walking, jumping, and a little bit of platforming
but add strobing lights, or fucking depth of field fuckery and suddenly the game is nearly unplayable
when that isnt happening though the biggest dangers are getting lost accidentally or falling off a ledge accidentally

apparently multiple parts of the game are homages to other works with similar architectural styles like Blame! (never read cant comment) and this one french art video which honestly watching it is almost exactly like playing the game in some odd way

it only took me about 3 hours to beat the game, honestly it felt way longer (though i did have long gaps between play sessions)

this game reminds me of rouge noir in experience
basically doing nothing, mostly just something to look at

maybe if you play it you'll see the deeper message, or maybe you'll see the interesting and unique architecture, or maybe you'll turn it off once the film grain gets too annoying or the music gets too grating, i dont really know
it is FREE though so you have no excuse for at least giving it a try!

This game feels extremely chaotic, where a lot of gameplay elements seem out of place. At first, I did enjoy the puzzles and found them interesting because of the unique approach. And by the end, I still didn't mind them that much, but that's about it. It felt like the approach to puzzles in the first hour or so had vanished and now I had to deal with much more boring ones. Most of them started being nothing but just run there in time, or click this and that in the right order. At some point, I solved a puzzle completely by accident. I wasn't lost and still was looking around and then I randomly clicked something that I didn't know I could click, I didn't even know this thing was there, and the puzzle got solved. Besides that, most of the puzzles don't rely on your wit to solve them, but rather on you traversing large areas and finding all the objects to, again, click in the right order. I did enjoy the visuals of the game, especially in the first hours of the game, but after that, I found myself traversing long distances and still being in the basically same area, without anything changing, but the rooms that you go through which themselves are empty and not memorable at all. I recognize that this is the intended mood and design of the game, but I would much rather prefer the areas to be smaller, or at least the paths that you have to traverse. If you have a walking sim and cannot make those long runs actually interesting, then the game has a lot of problems. Honestly, I found most of the platforming to be fine. It was the most fun part of the gameplay, but quite often I got lost during the platforming because the game showed me multiple paths to choose from and each one of them led to nowhere except for one that actually was the right one. On one hand, I do appreciate that the place isn't linear because it does fit this game, but, again, there wasn't absolutely anything in the paths that I took that were the wrong ones. You go, you see a wall or a precipice, and then you go back and choose another path. I really don't like dropping games that I already decided to play and where I already made decent progress, but at the end I just felt annoyed and wasn't enjoying anything that the game gave me, which is usually rare. This is a shame, because, the first hour and then the first half of the city area were really engaging and felt unique and made me look around and actually want to investigate the place. Ah, yeah, and the checkpoints fucking suck. Instead of letting you save the game for yourself, you have to walk thousands of kilometers in some moments because you accidentally got stuck in one of the places, where the game technically allowed you to go, but from where was no place out. Or when you fail a puzzle and die and have to go for half a minute or so to actually get back to solving the puzzle.
It's not a terrible game, don't get me wrong. It really has a dense atmosphere with breathtaking visuals, but it just stops working because of the gameplay after some point.
Grade: 4/10