This game is easily one of the most lovely, charming and brilliant puzzle experiences I've ever played. As always, Amanita comes back with beautiful art and coupled with the superb music, some brilliant puzzle design and one of the cutest stories in video games, this game is simply the whole package. None of the puzzles are particularly "hard" and you could solve any of them simply with some thought but they definitely make you think at times. The mechanics are extremely inventive, asking you to play with lights and enemies that are in themselves pieces to the solution. I don't want to say more because finding out the mechanics is a joy in itself. The music adds so much to this and is as much a part of the brilliance of the puzzle design as everything else. As you unlock and move through the puzzle, the music steadily increases in complexity, adding drums, flutes and other instruments, cleverly leading you along and letting you know you're doing the right thing. This seems like such a minor detail but adds so much to the exhilarating feeling of solving them. Scattered throughout the levels are small paintings and toys, some of them obvious to find, some hidden and each is an adorable and zany vignette that is such a pleasure to experience

I could easily recommend this game to people of all ages and this is definitely one of the most memorable gaming experiences I've had

A pretty great story with a somewhat unsatisfying end. They could have done a bit more with the ending considering how extensively a lot of the second half accounts for different party members. A lot of the story presents some genuine dilemmas in choice that don't really impact you in significant ways but still feel like choices you make. Some stuff comes completely out of left field and there's some really neat twists and story beats that kept me on the edge of my seat. The characters are all very entertaining and there's a surprising amount of really funny humor that made me genuinely laugh out loud. The puzzles have zero moon logic to them and you can get hints from your companions at almost every step of the way

I highly recommend it for fans of point-and-clicks and anyone looking for a good story

A fairly relaxing, slightly creepy and very atmospheric little puzzle game. The gameplay almost entirely consists of following clues left behind to either deduce the plant necessary to move forward or the part of the map you need to visit. I finished naming every single plant in a little over 5 hours so the game is fairly short but it was pretty engaging the whole way through. The whole thing is told to you in very well written text and it was fun following some of the characters that you initially only have contact with through letters

This is one of the most unique games I've ever played. Probably the first game where you actually make deductions based on evidence like an actual detective and can use evidence to come to your own conclusions way before your character does. The visual style is such a mishmash but somehow it just works. The music is a fantastic blend of synthwave and smooth jazz. The worldbuilding is beyond anything I've seen in games and is the most original setting for a game I've ever had the pleasure of playing. The pixel hunting aspect can get a bit tiresome but, for the most part, actual clues and evidence is usually in obvious places and extras aren't all that necessary but you'd be advised to at least have enough to get certain collectibles and gather testimonies from a particular character though it's enough if you keep a buffer of 15 gems all the time. The weakest aspect is probably the ending which requires some degree of stretching even with the crazy wild setting but it's wrapped up fairly neatly

Highly recommended for how unique of an experience it is

This is a walking simulator disguised as a high concept puzzle game. I wouldn't have minded it being a walking simulator. I really do like the genre and don't really want to call it as such but it's the best name for those sorts of experiences. But I don't expect to be blown away by the concept of a puzzle game and then turned around by mediocre puzzles and an extremely forced narrative that does not work

Honestly, the first room has pretty much the most original and high-concept of the puzzles you'll ever see in the game. Some of the mechanics are very poorly described and figuring out some solutions will make you go "THAT'S what they wanted me to do?". The final chapter of the game is some parts you trying to figure out what the devs intended you to do which usually involves doing something fairly mundane but obscure and mostly just walking through interesting visuals the devs conjured up

I liked Antichamber because it had interesting puzzle mechanics in addition to its visuals and didn't have any pretense. It had a similar last act that involved a fair bit of walking which was earned after some fairly difficult puzzles. Even if the puzzles mostly revolved around the gun halfway through they were still extremely difficult and required quite a bit of thought. Portal ramped up in similar ways and Portal 2 brought innovative mechanics in the second half to keep you on your toes. This game has none of that. The puzzles are bog standard and some are only difficult because the solutions are obscure and very poorly communicated. This game commits the cardinal sin of introducing random mechanics that are never signposted well and instead require you to guess. There's one room especially with an extremely childish and awful solution which has zero communication. And it's only used in that one room. Brilliant

You might get more mileage if you try some of the challenges. One of the achievements is a 30 minute speedrun. If you really want, you could try to go for this stuff. Personally I couldn't care less. The game just didn't work for me on any level. Quite a disappointment

You don’t need another review raving about this game. It’s definitely good. The story is very well done, it looks great, it sounds fan-flarkin'-tastic with a kickass soundtrack and the combat is actually fairly solid and occasionally challenging. The voice acting is sublime and a lot of the choices matter in huge ways even if they don't really affect the main story that much. So instead of a list of what makes this great, I'll just put up some caveats so you're prepared for some things to expect that aren't so good.

This game is buggy. Extremely so. I’ve not had any crashes but I’ve had multiple bugs that have stopped progress completely. Once my character refused to move forward in a brief on-rails segment that required a full restart of the game. Once an enemy blinked out of existence or went off to contemplate a brighter future without fighting which left the combat sequence running that never ended forcing me to do a reload. One time, a combat sequence abruptly ended without all the enemies getting killed which triggered a dialog sequence but I still had to kill the creature which was completely inert. This game also does heinous things to my GPU which causes all sorts of weird scut with the graphics when I quit to desktop and once I had to restart the whole machine to resolve it. Tons of small bugs everywhere with minor things that take you out now and again. They don’t hamper the experience too much but watch out for them.

This game sorely lacks a final pass of polish. The game has a TON of dialog and some of it is poorly paced. There are some minor conversation sequences on your ship that end in a really weird way with the other character walking off the scene before they finish saying the last line. Sometimes they get interrupted when saying something on a scripted sequence which sounds bizarre. They needed some way of interrupting a character properly because the way they abruptly stop talking sometimes sounds really weird.

The game also weirdly doesn’t tell you sometimes that you can move on. Some sections have infinitely spawning segments and it’s not totally clear what you need to do before you can move on and you can get stuck in a combat loop just doing the same thing over and over before you figure out by accident or by picking up clues from what the gang are screaming about during the fight. Sometimes it’s not quite obvious what you need to do and it leads to a couple of segments where you flounder until you find what you’re supposed to do. Which is sort of thematic but doesn’t make for a good gameplay experience.

There's some stuff that I wish was ironed out but it's ultimately a very well crafted, enjoyable and raucous romp that's riveting. Though, I do advise that you take a "stop and smell the roses" approach to moving through the game. Don't run towards your next objective. There's TONS of small flavor dialog that the characters say and some of them are really sweet, cute, hilarious, heartwarming, sad and all sorts of evocative stuff. Take your time and soak it in. While the gang certainly get on your nerves in the beginning, you warm up to them and get used to the bickering and slowly grow into the ass-kicking team you're supposed to be.

This game does not live up to the promise of VLR and has far too many loose ends and problems to be "good". But there's really nothing else quite like this series that aims so high and is definitely a unique experience in its own right.

Unfortunately, there are so many problems that aren't just the story. To get it out of the way, the story just doesn't form a cohesive narrative and just isn't as insane as VLR got to ignore those problems. It doesn't tie up most of the loose ends from VLR and adds new holes that are fairly egregious. While a lot of people say this devolves into nonsense, I'd say this doesn't go nearly as hard into the crazy as VLR did and that brings the game down a lot for me. It's far too serious in my opinion. In terms of pure gameplay, the UI is outright bad and the game just looks terrible. So many weird gameplay choices that I just cannot condone. The timeline is a massive pain to navigate and you have to resort to hunting for the next section, made more difficult by how unintuitively it is organised. The memo and file system is really irritating to navigate and a lot of the time you need to have both open and the game just doesn't let you. The memo system has added a new "ink" system that keeps going down the more you write on screen which was already useless and limiting but for SOME REASON, ERASING MAKES THE METER GO DOWN TOO. There's also some abject garbage with certain choice paths where you need to type in something instead of being given a MCQ, but sometimes the text to unlock some paths is not communicated at all which completely halts your progress because you don't know what you're supposed to be doing. The puzzle rooms are all of middling quality and maybe 3/13 rooms were actually interesting enough. It just devolves into either a "click everything" fest or a linear "follow the instructions" snooze.

The game also just looks terrible. They went for a fully 3D modelled aesthetic but the textures are really horrible and ugly. The PS4 version has a much better lighting system that adds dynamic shadows that fixed a lot of glaring problems with the art style but that's completely missing from this version. The music, while great, is largely simply tracks from VLR and I didn't recognise any new tracks.

All the good in the story and the sheer ambition does not outweight the facts that the game looks bad, plays bad and ends bad. If you're a VLR fan, you're probably invested enough that you'll play it anyway. For anyone new to the series, don't start with this game and maybe don't play it at all.