izigame.me

When I bought this game, I was sure that I was going to enjoy it. On paper it has everything: it's basically a clone of Portal but with a new interesting concept, beautiful graphics, good sound design, and a new mystery to solve... What could go wrong? you might ask. Well... Spoilers: Everything. And since this game even doesn't hide that it is trying to replicate Portal, I'm going to compare them on some aspects.

Gameplay.

Honestly, I got bored even before I was halfway through the game, and the only thing that kept me going was the plot (but about it later). First of all, puzzles are very repetetive. At some point I even thought "wait, didn't I already go through this puzzle?" Also, there were only a few puzzles after after completing which I felt satisfied. In most cases you just immediately understand how to solve the puzzle but you have to reverse all the steps in your mind and spend a few minutes just moving cubes around. Secondly, The concept of puzzles with time rewinding sounds a lot more interesting in theory than it actually is in practice. The whole gameplay literally comes down to 3 things: walk (you can't even run), jump on jumping cubes (normal jump height is extremely low, so it's pointless) and press ONLY ONE BUTTON to rewind cubes to the buttons/laser receptors to open the door. I think I don't have to remind you that in Portal you ACTUALLY INTERACT with the world and physics... Hell, I'd really better spent this time jumping through the portals with no purpose.

Story.

As I said the story was one and only reason I finished this game. You start with a very intriguing question "where did everybody go? why everything is destroyed?", then you find your portal gun entropy gun and woman AI that tells you to complete puzzles (feels new to me :))
But okay, to be honest, first 70% of the story felt really good. The chatter between the protagonist (Aria) and AI (Astra) is probably one of the brightest parts of the game, although having some extremely stupid "What could that mean?" questions sometimes. And I was still going to praise the plot 1 or 2 hours before the completion. But that ending... it's just not the way to write a compelling story. It destroyed everything it was built on. Now there will be LITE spoilers to finish the topic (they literally tell you this in the middle of playthrough).
Obviously, You save the world in the end. But it doesn't matter. They saved it hundreds of times and at the end of the day humanity kills itself anyway. Although I like the moral message that's behind this and I think this plot may even work in a movie, it's totally inappropriate for a game where you have to feel a sense of victory, not just watch things happen without ability to change anything.

Level design.

Let's talk about the believability of the world. I mean, puzzle areas are puzzle areas, but if you want to show the world around them, it must feel real. Yes, I understand that they tried to integrate a certain challenge between the main puzzles themselves. But was it worth sacrificing the plausibility of the world for that? I'm not sure. I just kept catching myself thinking "I don't believe it". I dont believe that the safest and most convenient way to move between working stations (where regular staff work - not puzzle operatives) is to fly through the air over the void. I don't belive that to open the door on one level of living quarters you have to activate the button on another level (I wouldn't want to live here xD). These are only two examples, but there were a lot more... And I'm not even talking about destructions that conveniently happen to occur at exactly the right place and time so that you can overcome an obstacle. It feels more like a neverending contrived puzzle, rather than a real destructed facility.
Also, I want to mention that rooms and corridors between puzzle areas are bleak and boring. I'm an explorer type of player, and as usual I started to explore every possible corner for interesting details and information that I can discover... The game broke me pretty quickly. With few exceptions, there is nothing to explore. You have some PCs providing plot information, and that's all. There is a lot of objects lying around, but they're all repeating and you basically can't interact with them. At some point I was already so used to this emptiness that I even missed two achievements that game suddenly decided to add to ONE chapter.

Graphics.

Last and probably least, visuals. I see this game as a good example of the possibilities that Epic is providing with UnrealEngine. On first look, everything is stunning. Lights, shaders, effects and particles are extremely beautiful. And that's what most of the players will probably see. But I have a curse - I am a 3d artist myself. So I wasn't surprised to find out that this game was basically created by one man... (Huge respect to him anyway! bcs I know how hard it is to create a game more than most of the people out there) I don't want to dive deep into issues of textures and models, but I couldn't stop noticing them all the time as I played. You know, I replayed Portal 2 couple of months ago and my god it does still look beautiful. Yes, UE provides this modern shine and volume for everybody, but if you peel that layer off, you can see that visual quality of this game is not so far away from the game, released in 2011. It's crazy to think that one man nowadays can achieve similar results to a huge studio 10 years ago...
Yeah, I know this was a lot of text, but I just wanted to share my genuine thoughts and feelings about this game. Hope this was helpful or at least interesting to read. If so, I'd be happy to see your like :)