izigame.me

This game needs to decide what it is
It treats itself like an escape room game but wrapped itself up in a botany sim where you can explore an old-world manor. The devs hit in the middle of the road for those three themes but was lacking in mechanics for almost all of them.
So you want to be an escape room...
This is a great story arch, forward moving plot, and the largest campus for an escape room I have seen on steam.
But Please - let me write in the journal - OR - save the relevant snippings to my journal before it gets spun into the text sentence in the final entry the game writes. A highligh ability for the text passage to record on my page, or cuttings of the letters / books, or a watercolour swatch of the sunsets. Just literally anything I can refer back to without having to walk to the other side of the map! Making me copy down a 5x5 table chart is a bit much for my deep-fried-american brain.
This campus is huge for an escape-room game and walking around to recheck clues is a pain. It's missing a very crucial inventory screen where you can refer back to scraps of paper or even sketches of hints from earlier. These 1890s letters that Arabella has left around her grounds before vacation are sure to fit in her pockets! I feel like all of the walking artificially slowed my game-time. If the game wants to truly be immersive, and the ending remains the same, I really really need to be able to write in the book. There is no joy in me repeating "97, 97, 97" in my head while walking to the other side of the area, I guarantee Arabella would write it down. I feel like there is a very reasonable plot-explanation for her to record things as it stands.
I fear the push to get this onto every major game platform in the release year from a smaller studio made them skip this very basic feature. Despite this, the key to knowing a game-devs are actually working on their games is to see that they have the most bare-bones website possible, 100% best example of computer people who are actually busy is not having an indepth website. I just hope that they find the time to revisit this mechanic so that their fans know the dev is actually willing to listen and stay ontop of maintaining their games. I mean - follow exactly how Snoozy Kazoo, creators of Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, handled it.
So you want to be a botany sim...
This game is missing pivotal features like experimentation or any sort of reward for making plants incorrectly or going off the beat of the railroaded story. This game is soothing, so there is absolutely no desire to interact with the plants or make a franken-plant of some freakish nature.
Around the map are different chemicals, soil additives, and pots of different pH balances. I had 0 desire to explore the map to tinker with these mechanics because it is clear the game will not give a themed reaction. This game does not reward the curiosity of putting the windmill flower from Chapter 1 into the windy tower another later plant requires. There are no achievements tied to this, so I am forced to play as the character they intended - who I actually personally quite enjoy following the story of through letters.
The lack of an inventory feature / documentation of research / ability to record notes makes this game very hard to pick back up inbetween chapters the next game session. You are going to have to backtrack
So you want me to explore the manor...
Then after the plot is finished.. please get rid of the literal table blocking the gap between the first and last areas! Let me observe the grounds and get around easier! Please fix the glitch where you cannot use the morse code machine in the post credits that your studio has known about.
Please put more unrelated stuff to read through, more assets, more passages, and more history of the manor itself. If there was a section of my journal where I could submit a history of the manor, or a biography of my grandmothers work, or something to snub Montague for stealing my research and submitting it as his own. Maybe letters of praise from different friends I helped, or even on the ending classroom's seating chart a note of my student's specialty flowers so there is more of a tie back to the letters I received during the game.
Major Compliments:
- Laure De Mey, as Creative Director - I now know that she was the secret sauce at ustwo games now that she has her own studio. Even her mobile game Discosnakes (a pixel snake disco game for iPhone) RULES.
- The soundtrack is truly amazing. Thomas Williams really blew it out of the water here.
- The aesthetic, especially that of the stained glass, is peak. I truly love this era and I would love to see the stained glass highlighted more.
- C O Z Y
- The plot through found objects alone is great! It certainly appealed to my demographic and I can tell that diversity is truly close to everything this team works on.
I am excited for some of these issues to get fixed in a 2.0 patch. I would suggest fixing the escape room path and finding a way to do-so without the users typing on a keyboard, considering this is a cross platform release. Let me document my duck friends!