Recent reviews by Devil#2

Who doesn't love some balls?

The impression I had when I walked away from this game is that it should have been done in a different medium. The story may have been good, but I approached it as a game, involving first-person atmospheric horror, and the story was being presented to me as on-screen text, which felt like an intrusion.

I didn't finish it, because the mountain can only be entered once the player has discovered all the pieces of the story. Having missed some piece somewhere, I wasn't too interested in wandering around for who knows how long before I found it and could advance.

I have no criticism for the graphics of the game, as it was obviously a labor of love by probably only one person, and production value takes man-hours. What I was disappointed by was the fact that it didn't convey its story through gameplay, which is kind of why you make something in this particular medium. Stories, especially ones being told in a horror-esque setting are best conveyed visually, where the player see, hears, and interacts with the environment. In this, portions of the story are told out of order when the player interacts with objects that may have nothing to do with the story section being told. That, and the various clips found in a room can start overlapping, making it impossible to read.

I don't regret the money spent to support new developers, but I would suggest to creator to give some thought to the medium you're creating in. If you want to tell a story, find ways to convey it to the player without resorting solely to text.

This game requires a bit of compartmentalization. As a TL;DR for anyone reading, if you're into the kind of challenging logic puzzles the game offers, this game is well worth the money. But that's really the only reason to buy it.

Let's start with the good. The puzzles in this game are all based on an extremely simple idea: get a line from point A to point B. However, the game sprinkles in so many different rules and requirements the player has to meet along the way that some of the puzzles can be extremely difficult. It starts with simple maze puzzles, but expands with icons that reflect shapes that need to fit into sections the player makes, to color-coded icons that need to be grouped or divided in various ways, all the way to affecting the color of the icons using glass partitions and colored lighting. The number of iterations on the same concept is actually very impressive. I particularly like the puzzles that require the player to physically position themselves to gain the proper perspective on the board to see the solution.

The open-world nature of the island can lead to some frustration, though. The player can come across puzzles that require some fore-knowledge that they haven't gained yet. My advice to anyone looking to pick this up is to never be afraid of walking away from a puzzle you don't understand. Go exploring, and you'll eventually come across the tutorial panels for the information you're missing.

The puzzle portion of the game is the reason you should buy this game. Check out some youtube videos that show what the puzzles are, and if they interest you, the game is worth buying. If there's any problem with them, it's that there is an overwhelming number of them.

This game is gorgeous. There are likely some that aren't into the aesthetic of the game and want photorealistic graphics, but this game doesn't have that. If you're not that type of person, the extraordinarily colorful and varied landscape is actually very refreshing. I didn't run into any situations where the game ran slowly for me, but that no doubt depends on the machine you're on. Some of the environments also play into the puzzles, as mentioned above, and that's really the most creative part about the game. Going around exploring the island and discovering all that's hidden away is a nice way to give the player a chance to breathe in between puzzles.

If there's one complaint, it's that the environment suggests a bigger story with the island. The game has a Myst vibe to it that makes you feel like you're seeing a lot of real history and that people have been there before, but the game never really delivers on that. This actually makes the whole island feel much more artificial.

The Witness is pretentious. There's really no way to justify the "artistic" element in the game. On this strange island that has so much detail in it, the player starts to think there might be a greater message, a bigger story that happened in the past, and they're doing all the puzzles to figure that out. There seem to be experiments, archaeological digs, and statues of people that...might have been alive at some point? It seems like such a mystery, and it's fun to explore the environment and wonder what the answer could be.

Instead what the developers decided to do was record people reading famous quotes by famous people and scatter them as collectibles throughout the island. Yeah, the first one you find is kind of interesting, but after a couple more, you realize what the "artistic" message is supposed to be and that the developer couldn't convey that message themselves. They had to cobble together a selection of supposedly profound sayings from other people and create this Frankenstein's monster and call it "art". It doesn't take many of these tape recorders for the player to say, "Yes, science is the only true religion, I get it. Couldn't you have come up with an actually creative way of conveying this sentiment via gameplay or visual story telling?"

And around that time you'll likely find the theater room. This is a small area off the beaten path that includes a projector tied into a puzzle panel. The player can find secret codes behind locked doors to enter into this machine for secret surprises. These turn out to be complete videos of some of the people the tape recorders have been quoting saying more of the same stuff you've probably been listening to this entire game, along with some cinematic clips that seem profound. Look, that guy is carrying that candle, and it's all one continuous take, how artistic!

And this is a major problem with the game. I find it less enjoyable to solve difficult problems to unlock new areas if all I'm going to get is more puzzles and preachy quotes the developers substitute for artistic merit. I like the puzzles and the visuals, but this grates on my nerves.

And worse still, there is one thing that the game does that I would have loved to see developed more. While playing the game, you'll eventually see a puzzle in the environment. I first saw it as a reflection on the water, the distict circle with the line that has a beveled end. I thought it was weird, and was amazed when I found I could actually trace a line down it just like all the puzzles I'd been doing up to that point. I was even rewarded with a big booming noise when I completed it. Suddenly, I began to see those puzzles scattered all throughout the island, usually requiring I find the right perspective. Walking into a forest, I saw another puzzle start to form in the tree's canopy. I could even find some in the clouds when I was standing on the right hill-top.

This element of the game was facinating and clever, and I find this to be where the greatest potential for artistic merit in the game lies. The player spends so much time solving these puzzles that they start to see the patterns in the world at large. First on a building, then in the trees and the water and the sky. Isn't this a good way to make an artistic message about recognizing the same patterns from the smallest elements in reality to the great expanses of the universe and finding some form of spirituality in the surprising order of chaos? This isn't a new idea, but the way the game never forces you to spot these large environmental puzzles, yet almost guarantees the player finds at least one could have been such an interesting way to convey that message.

But these puzzles don't really do anything. To my knowledge, finding the dozens of them that exist maybe gives you an achievement. Unfortunately there are so many of them that hunting them all down is way more than I'm willing to do. Such a waste of a good idea.

So the game is fatally flawed, but if you approach it with the right expectations, you can still have a lot of fun with it. The puzzles are good and challenging, and the game does a decent job of giving you the tools you need to solve them, albeit in a way that sometimes requires you to walk away from puzzles until you get the information you need. This aspect of the game is the only reason to buy it, however. The game really wants to be artistic, but it's terribly misguided in its execution. Do not buy this game for a story, as you won't get any here.

Peter Molyneux really just needs to repeat the following line to himself until he takes it to heart and drastically alters the Godus game's course:

"All the players really wanted was another Populous."

And Godus Wars is closer to that idea than Godus was. However, it seems like 22Cans is so concerned about creating something "new" that will make them significant residual income that they (or more likely Peter) refuses to accept that fact. Were they to scrap the cards, make the terrain sculpting easier and more powerful, allow buildings to be torn down to make room for larger abodes, and took away the player's direct control of units and instead gave them Godly powers to indirectly influence the civilians, you'd pretty much be there.

As it is, this seems to be a poor attempt to run away from the negative reviews of Godus by simply rereleasing it under another name, with an RTS game that is incredibly simple and also includes some terrain sculpting. It's just not fun.

Peter, buddy, just keep repeating that above line to yourself. You can turn the game around, and people would buy it because they loved Populous. Seriously, it's why people gave you money for it in the first place, just make it.

This game requires you to do math.

That is all.

Kerbal Space Program makes it fun to fail at rocket science. With the new career mode, the player's goals are still a bit abstract and open while being more focused at the same time. It's no longer a matter of building the biggest rocket behemoth your computer can handle, you actually have to design your craft intelligently to make the best use of the modules currently available to you to complete a specific goal.

Also, Jebediah is a boss.