izigame.me

I'm of a mixed opinion about this game. There are things to like, but there are alot of problems with it as well, so I cannot recommend it.
tl;dr: Great idea. Bad execution that wastes a lot of your time.
Premise seemed interesting. Reminded me of Ico and Wonder project J2 but with an escape room twist. SIt in a chair, figure out puzzles, guide the girl to do stuff. What could go wrong. Well, mostly stuff with the girl could go wrong.
Let's start with the good things first. The setting is weird and intriguing. The girl is well animated and acted. Puzzles are mostly fine and varied... And that's about it.
First, game feels very fragmented. There is not much of a journey that you take while bonding with the girl. Ico this game is not. And while the escape room setting kinda implies that the game would be separated into different rooms, that's not what I'm talking about. It's the way the game constantly bombards you with the fake endings, that I have an issue with. You start a game, complete a challenge room or two, then suddenly get an ending (pretty short and unsatisfying). You go back, pick a different room, solve one more puzzle and get another ending (or more like a variation of the first one). These endings don't make much sense (at first at least) and kinda break the feeling of progression in my opinion, and feel kinda pointless.
Second, the game likes to waste your time alot. Not just with the meaningless endings. The "gameplay" itself is very slow. You might be the smartest person in the world and figure out a puzzle in a matter of seconds, but it will take several minutes to guide the girl to do all the required actions. She does everything very slowly. She asks for confirmation before doing most actions. And sometimes she ignores your commands entirely. It also doesn't help that the laser that you point with doesn't register the command until it stops shining. Which takes a second or two. A second here, an ignored command there, and you get the game where you mostly wait instead of thinking or doing anything meaningful.
Now I may be exagerating a bit, but the game really felt very tedious from the bery beginning. And there was not much story or character development to distract from that. Sure by the end I kinda pieced together what's going on and warmed up to the girl. But it took a while. Literally. This game could be 2 to 3 times shorter easily.
Now if you're into achievements, then not only will you have to solve every puzzle and watch every ending. You'll have to fail every puzzle as well. Which means playing through every puzzle at least twice. More if you can't figure out the solution quckly enough or accidentally misclick and fail. Which means watching all those slow animations all over again. Prepare to be patient with this game.
Now the kicker is if you finished the game and watched the final ending your save locks up. Every time you load it you'll just watch the ending again. If you want to revisit some of the puzzles or finish up the remaining achievements the only option is to start all over again. 10/10 game design.