Ive slowed down a bit on the amount of reviews I write because I feel like for most games I play I simply dont "have anything to say" about them. I think thats still the case for this game but I just kind of need to get it out of my system : fuck this game.

What an amazing first impression, the music, the artstyle and even the writing with its subtlety and charm. Unfortunately as you get through it all you'll start to realize how boring most of the game is, mainly through repetition. Its kind of impressive how much a mere 3 hour (at least thats what my 2 runs ended up clocking at) game can outstay its welcome in this manner. The very backgrounds that were once gorgeous to look at become a reminder of the annoyance of having to see it again. You basically go through every single location twice, in a game which demands multiple runs of you!

I get the feeling that at some point someone is going to beat this game and tell me that "oh, that was the point" somehow, as usually happens on the internet whenever I dislike a particular design decision, but honestly I dont see it. I fail to see how the repetition adds to anything, it isnt moody or atmospheric, it doesnt reinforce any point about the themes of the game (unless being bored out of my mind has anything to do with entropy, stories or colonialism) and even if it did would not be worth doing anyways.

The puzzles are lame but honestly I didnt even mind that all that much. More than anything I think Ive started to despise the "syke, you got the bad ending! try again to get the good one" structure that historically a lot of videogames have adopted, doubly so in a game which is again, repetitive and boring. I am admittedly unhinged and I did think for a joke about copy pasting each paragraph of this review 3 or 4 times to make reading it a chore in a parallel to the game but even I'M not pretentious enough for that.

At the end of the day, I ran through the game once, got a bad ending, got told to find something, did another run, this time doing different things and seemingly being pushed in a different direction, but again a different bad ending. Now, am I going to run through again to get the good ending? No, get fucked, the game already lost me after the first run, a third run would count as self flagellation. Its my own damn fault for playing an adventure game on launch, always play this shit a few months down the line when you can look up the true ending path and not have more of your limited time on this planet wasted.

Edit : half a star for the "flora de las islas canarias" tome in the background of one of the locations

Edit 2: Okay, someone posted a walkthrough of the game and now I can say for sure I didnt miss much by bailing on this game. As it turns out the "runs" are entirely artificial, they all go the same, you do 1st run, then 2nd then you get the true ending on the 3rd. The ending sort of contextualizes why and its not the worst thing Ive seen, but the writing in general smacks of (to quote fellow Backloggd user Gare) "this is my project in submitting because I want an internship at Pixar but I never learned how to tell a story" though I guess that should be toei and not pixar cause its a japanese game. The runs are KINDA justified in conveying the themes of the story but that still doesnt make the game any less dull or repetitive so whatever, I stand by my original review