izigame.me

I really, really wanted to like this game, but after finishing it, I'm just disappointed. Perhaps the sunk cost fallacy entropy is the real entropy after all.
It is very similar game to portal, but without the extreme polish that comes from a major studio release (though they did release on schedule, not on valve time)
I really liked the environment design, some areas are gorgeous. The theming of everything is spot on, and I enjoyed the voice acting. The characters dialogue could be a shade dense at times. There's a point where something obvious is written on a wall and your character reads it then says "What could it mean?".
You have essentially 3 puzzle elements.
Cubes which press buttons/
Cubes which press buttons and also provide additional movement options.
Buttons which come in either the pressure plate variety that the player can stand on or place a cube on, or the laser "button" which are activated by the laser cube or static lasers in the environment.
Jump cubes can be a little irritating to land on at times. You can hit the edge and stop dead, requiring the whole solution to be rebuilt.
Minor irritations:
I don't like the lack of a crouch button. I see why it was excluded (so you cant go in the bot/cube holes but it doesn't make sense in the fiction.
I'm not keen that your character is water soluble, sometimes going ankle deep with instantly kill you.
Some of the checkpoints are a bit distant too, requiring several minutes of puzzle to be completed again because you slipped when exploring.
I don't know if I'm jaded by playing a lot of this type of game, but I did find the puzzles to be extremely repetitive. There are several puzzles which require the same actions in the same order, but the layout is different. Same solution though.
All puzzles are solved using the exact same formula: by placing all cubes where you need them last, then where you need them second to last, etc then rewinding them as required. Most puzzles I solved in 2-3 minutes, except the really long ones. A couple made me think, but not enough of the 50-ish this game contains.
I also found that the middle part of the game was really tedious because of this.
Mid game high level detail, not really a spoiler:
Acts 6-12 are frustrating because very little additional complexity was added, and at Act 6, a new urgent time sensitive threat is revealed, that you are reminded of constantly. Its not real-time, but nevertheless the various characters keep saying "Oh we really should hurry to solve this problem", but then we just take the only route through another act with another 5 puzzles.
Late game continuation spoilers:
Acts 14/15 do the same damn thing. There is an urgent thing to do, but lets make sure we mop up these last few puzzle areas first.
These final areas didn't provide much of a challenge, but one of the final areas just required a 30 second setup, a run through with a 30 second rewind, then the same again but this time with 2 cubes. Its very dull when you've figured out what to do and are just putting it into practice. If you make one mistake, it often means you have to completely reset everything which isn't a fun challenge.
Ending spoilers:
I was really disappointing by this ending. This disappointment is the reason I'm writing this review. Its written on the walls (not a metaphor) that there is nothing you can do to change the outcome of the game, but you keep playing thinking perhaps this time (i.e. on the story play through) it'll be different, perhaps that'll be the point of the story.
No, the point of the story is twofold:
1. Don't build a laser on the moon to rewind the planet (Don't play god).
2. This has all happened before and will all happen again. There's no point, everything is futile.
Another thing about the ending. The writing is on the wall (again not a metaphor) about this being a loop, also that the entropy device causes amnesia when used too frequently, also that Earth is in chaos. We also find out that cataclysms were coming thick and fast before the big-unrewindable one.
Could it be perhaps that the current cataclysm we are rewinding can't be effectively rewound because the people in charge of resolving it have had their brains tampered with one too many times? It's not a hard conclusion to form, and you can form it at about the halfway mark, then nothing in the game really surprises you.
The only surprise was that there was not surprise. No twist ending, no, its exactly what you expected, there's nothing you can do, same as the last 99999 times you tried. Perhaps that's the greatest surprise of them all.
All considered, I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. I probably would have been happier overall if I'd never bought this game, or at least stopped about a third of the way in.