izigame.me

I didn’t outright dislike this DLC, and as usual, the puzzles are clever. I disagree with other negative reviews claiming that the solutions require large leaps of logic; I think the hints were very intentionally designed, particularly in regard to visual cues. I appreciate that the game rewards paying attention to the artwork, and that it’s not just an arbitrary vehicle to collect keywords. Mechanically speaking, it held up the good puzzle quality.
My complaint is that the content was 1) disappointingly thin this time, and 2) feels narratively irrelevant. Having purchased and loved all DLC to date, for me this seemed to be by far the shortest and easiest puzzle set and only took a couple hours, without any potent “aha!” payoff. More like, “Oh, huh, cool.” Compared to previous releases, it feels like the game equivalent of shrinkflation and was distinctly a bit unsatisfying. It is the first time I would have retrospectively chosen to skip it, and if this had somehow been my introduction to the series, I would probably not have developed further interest.
To put it another way, it’s a relatively forgettable and quick installment of a game which at its baseline is always a pretty thoughtful puzzle challenge. It’s up to you if that alone is worth your time and money. After playing this, I am a bit worried that the series will trend towards lower effort little self-contained bites. To me, a critical aspect of what makes a mystery enjoyable is having some story-related curiosity to solve it, such as being invested in the characters or witnessing something profoundly idiosyncratic. Here, the game is so short that there doesn’t feel like adequate time to care about anyone, it’s visually and thematically repetitive (a cult again, but make it more boring and shallow), and since it’s a prequel spin-off, it doesn’t even create any speculation or anticipation because we already know the wider context and how everything plays out afterward. I wasn’t particularly intrigued by where this was going, and the denouement was underwhelming, cynical, and low impact. Although solving puzzles on the level of “What plant was in the jar?” can be fun in itself, I just didn’t really care! There was nothing uniquely bizarre this time that made me think, “Wow, I’ve got to know the explanation for THAT”, just, “Oh, culty people doing petty culty things and killing each other because of petty culty things, well, have at it.” No philosophical visions, no grand plans, no conspiracy, nobody worth rooting for. The Lemurian theme felt especially stale here after we’ve already been dazzled by far greater plots and puzzles in this universe.
If you just want some good standalone puzzles to scratch the itch, then this is still a solid buy; the developers are consistently very talented at that. If you want to be fascinated by something extremely weird and have your imagination stimulated, which is why I became a fan of this series, then IMO the going-ons are too cliché and rehashed this time for me to recommend.