izigame.me

This is a great example of a game where presentation makes a huge difference and dresses up what is honestly a fairly easy and gentle puzzle game and elevates it far beyond its content and makes it extremely compelling to experience. But before discussing all that, here's my spoiler free tip: DO NOT SPEND MONEY ON THE GACHAPON UNTIL THE END OF THE GAME.
I'll review the puzzles first because it's everything else that's interesting to talk about and not where the true difficulty of the game really is. The first few puzzles kind of threw me off with how baby easy they were and made me quite apprehensive of what was to come. And my fears were kind of realised when about 75% of the puzzles in the game are extremely easy to actually figure out once you have the clues. Most of the time, what you need to do to solve something will almost be explicitly spelled out in the form of notes or the order of the numbers involved and the solutions are usually surface level. The final few puzzles are where they bring together a fairly huge number of clues that you're probably been collecting throughout the whole game and executing the solution creates an extremely satisfying catharsis moment but otherwise, most of the puzzles are not all that difficult.
Because the true "difficulty" is the exploration element of the game. What you're actually doing the whole time is finding ways to break into the numerous locked off rooms and areas in the mansion where you've been led in mysterious circumstances and your job is to piece together not only how to get around the place but also what happened in this mansion across time and space through numerous books, notes and environmental clues. The problem is not figuring out the code to a box, the problem becomes where do I find the code to the box. Items that you found ten hours ago might suddenly come in handy and that thing you saw that you got in some room inside of the mansion suddenly becomes relevant when you are faced with a graveyard in the forest outside. It's so easy to simply take press a button on a lamp to open a door but the problem is more that you need to know that you can take an action on that lamp. That is a very trivial example to demonstrate that everything in the game is vital to opening up avenues of exploration and every single little hint you find matters. The game then becomes more of a point-and-click adventure than a simple set of puzzles and this made the experience very enjoyable. While this sounds annoying, the execution and the way every item highlights when you're close to it ensured that I almost never really missed an interactive element in the environment. One thing I'll say though is always experiment with the controls on every new screen and puzzle. The story also follows the same path as you find pieces that describe what happened and it's up to you to fit them all together by the end. There's a ton of notes to piece together what's really going on and while the game does tell its story in a fairly complex way, by the end, most things are almost explicitly spelled out and I was left satisfied with the narrative while also given enough fragments to fill in the gaps.
The game is not without its minor faults especially because almost half my time was spent walking from place to place. While you don't move particularly slowly, the "run" option is locked for a significant portion of the game and is extremely annoying to use. Your inventory becomes cluttered with all the crud that you collect throughout the game and very few items are removed especially when they're exhausted, single-use keys for example. There's a maze in the game that gets more and more irritating to navigate and while they do give you a map, it doesn't show where you are and for late game spoiler reasons, it becomes vital to know that and it doesn't show you. The game's reliance on mazes was kind of grating but thankfully this only really set in minutes before the game ended. There's a money mechanic where you collect dollars scattered all over the place that they tell you doesn't matter to finish the game but you can only really get all the optional items and story bits if you collect all the cash. I wish I didn't waste all my money on the useless gachapon machine because they don't tell you that there's other better ways to spend it until you unlock them. Hence the tip at the top. I also wish there was something that told you where all the dollars where once you are a hair's breadth away from the end cause finding them all is very stupid and I still have one item left and I can't find it in me to go over every inch again.
Overall, this was an extremely compelling experience that I found well worth my time and money that eschews puzzle difficulty for intriguing and rewarding exploration across the map. The art and the story also come together to make it even better and the ideas presented here are very solid with execution to back it all up. Though I do wish the puzzles were a bit more actually difficult and required more thought and brain power.