Recent reviews by GreySpectrum

This is almost how you make a puzzle game.
It is 1/2 of a great puzzle game.
It is not a good puzzle game.

The opposite of this game, the other half, would be if there were simple rules, but no hints. Infuriating, right? Okay now how about a game with hints, but no rules? That is this game.

If the rules keep changing, its the same as if there are no rules. Sometimes it is collect triangles. Sometimes it is avoid triangles. Sometimes it is start on a triangle. Sometimes it is end on a triangle. Sometimes it is collect 2 triangles. Sometimes it is collect even numbers of triangles. Sometimes it is make a triangle with your line. With so many possibilities, and no consistent rules from level to level, I fail to see how I can understand anything. After all, how can I be sure I understood in the first place? Maybe the rule was entirely different. There is no way to tell. But it doesn't matter because the next puzzle is completely different. Yes I know I can redraw the line to test each theory, but ruling out options from infinite possibilities every time, is a recipe in madness, not a puzzle game.

Potentially one could get very good at ruling out rule sets of lines lengths, ending possibilities, starting possibilities, shape combinations, negative spaces, negative shapes, placement on the board, multiples of each of those, number of turns in the line, ratio of left and right turns, total corners of shapes collected, sequences of shapes collected, edges or corners of the boards being off limits, etc etc with a few deft moves on every board. Oi.

Not for me.

Disappointing.

It had nice art, but not incredible. The platforming doesn't feel amazingly smooth. I thought there must be some world-changing ending from all the praise it got, but no. It's just another relatively nice game. I can't help but feel was amazing to people who haven't played that many games like it before.

It's just good.

A little tedious. Every time they froze my character to show the area I had just entered instead of letting me explore, I died a little inside. But if you enjoy the art and lovingly designed soundscape, it is an enjoyable little game. A very unusual setting and a very unusual plot make this one-of-a-kind. I adore it.

It makes me really happy to see people grasping totally new perspectives from this little demonstration! If you haven't seen time captures before, this will be an absolute treat. I don't mean timelapses, but time projections.

The building is gorgeous, the rewinding music was fun, the museum reacting to you was a nice touch, and the interior design is lovely. The intro movie I assumed was going to be long and slow so I waited until I ran out of things to do to watch it and was extremely surprised to see how clever and concise it was.

But if you already have seen this concept before, then this isn't going to do much for you. It's one thing repeated in different formats. They are all nice, but ultimately its the same without exploring alternatives or implications of time-in-space. Why not have one where you adjust the "length" of time in the object? (where it isn't sliding forward but can be extended forward) Its a shame because computer graphics can show things like density and adjust speed of time and rotate through dimensions, but that wasn't played with at all! Where are other examples and comparisons, like light-writing, stopmotion, travel maps, footsteps in snow, relativity, etc? It's short and sweet with some nice (and some odd) explanations.

My favorite part was the recording of some ballet dancers spinning around each other, which finally clicked in my head about how one dimension had been removed. You could see the distance between them when they were across from one another, but it didn't exist anywhere when they were behind one another.

Lovely level design, I cannot praise it enough. I enjoy being in this world. Like NaissanceE.

Story is obviously "cool space stuff" thrown in a blender and gameplay is designed by someone who doesn't have a good grasp of what makes good puzzles or a fun game.

Each puzzle is a repeat of the last, no development of mechanics or clever repurposing of mechanics. If they were slowly teaching key puzzle elements this would be natural, but puzzle components are not visually telegraphed so I know they are not carefully teaching. (What do circles do? Sometimes act upon you permanently, sometimes only in a column, sometimes in a bubble!) At most puzzles stack more steps. I do not have faith they will develop mechanics beyond more objects with different directions.

Story is bad, I can already tell.
Trees are apparently a luxury item, but zero mention of how humanity is surviving if trees are gone. What generates the oxygen, the food? Are we all robots? Our player character is pretty human for that. Or is it just "trees" that are scarce and plants/algae are doing fine. Why? It doesn't make any sense.
But an "artefact" will fix it, except first it "tests" you. The aliens are not being charitable if they are... testing if we deserve to live? So what do the aliens get out of this? How do we know it will fix earth? It seems likely I am not supposed to ask these kinds of questions.
Ah yes and "don't go near the shadow" yet the voice doesn't care enough to take any actions in response to me disobeying.

If this is inspired by 2001 and Solaris, then why have buttons and cubes at all?

Play it for the gorgeous visuals, lovely atmosphere, and hope the puzzles don't get annoying to carry out.

They put a lot of thought into Fata Morgana. It has flaws. Its not perfect. It can be over-the-top, it can be repetetive, it can be too long, or too trite, or too perfect.

But it surpasses those flaws, and then transcends them. I would, with a little hesitation, call it a masterpiece.

It deserves all the praise it is getting.

.

You can't see around you. You can't steer easily. You can't move quickly without mashing constantly. The enemies come from offscreen at lightning speed to grab you and drag you away. Avoiding them is not fun. Getting caught by them is not fun. The controls are not intuitive and cannot be changed. (q to grab, s to chirp, e to dive, w to spew silver) Collecting items isn't fun. Ferrying objects from place to place is not fun. What you can fly through and what you crash into isn't clear and sometimes purposefully obtuse. What you can move and what you can break is not clear. There is no map. In the tutorial I was taught (very unclearly) what activating a tower would do. After the tutorial I activated a tower but it didn't do what I was taught towers do. I have no idea what activating that tower did. An arrow pointing to where go next is not a subsitute for game design that shows what to do next by making sense, or level design, or lighting, or curiousity. Items can be carried around and dropped where they will never be found again. I hope they aren't vital. Wind will blow through solid objects. The game is 2d and yet crashes on startup on my laptop. I am not surprised to hear other reviews say you will have to backtrack constantly to carry one object at a time to the same location over and over again.

Credit where credit is due, but what good TIMEFrame has is almost lost in translation.

In the end I felt the force of a struggle. In the end I felt the essense of a culture. In the end I felt the spirit of a populace.
But it was barely present enough for me to fill it in.

The layout of this toy microcosm doesn't make sense. Swaths of desert are interrupted by city or an astronomical observatory the size of a town. No roads, no sources of support, no people or charts or tools, no decoration, no signs of the importance or funtionality, placed between a mine and a city and a lake for no discernable reason. These monuments are symbols of what you have to imagine a society would have felt about them. It is a really good aesop fable and a really good series of metaphorical objects about the passage of the world and the sects who struggled to accept, or avoid, or deny it. But it is only that. They are at least monuments, rather than a giant model for what it is supposed to stand for, but the difference isn't enough. It feels closer to looking at a series of metaphorical objects, then actually exploring a civilization. It feels closer to an aesop fable about death than actually witnessing the passage of a world.

I can think of many ways this could have been deflected better. I wish there were more histories of the sects' philosophies. I wish there were more depictions (fantastical and otherwise) for what they attempted and paritally achieved through desperation. I wish there were stories of sacrifices and hopes and failures and strokes of triumph. I wish there had been much more slow-motion decay and destruction. I can image a game where you watch the impact tear the surface, the blast of winds, or the machines activating, or the city crumbling, or dams breaking and flooding the land below in a mesmerizing torrent. I can image walking among this or trying to stay ahead of a disaster to see more of what came before. That is not this game. It inspired me to imagine that, which is definitely something. I even think you are more than a historian, and play a role in how the civilization goes out; but I made that from my own symbolic interpretation of events. A lot just isn't there beyond your own pretending. I think I might love this game, but I love it more for what it points to than what it actually is.

I would have been a lot more disappointed if I had payed full price. This is small and does not have enough resonance or depth to compete with other fuller compositions. Is it worth playing though? Yes. Is it unique? Yes? Does it have something important to communicate? Yes. Is it symbolically beautiful? Yes. Is it notably pretty? Yes. Do I want others to experience it? Yes. But be prepared for the bare minimum of a truly breath-taking thing.

I tried to play this. I have a stomach for old clunky games. I love rich story games, and I enjoy shooters. So of course I loved this classic, right?
Nope. Not even close.
The slog was too much. And the dialogue was....
well it was okay, but not enough to keep me playing. The choices were rarely interesting, (I stopped before finishing chapter 3) I've heard the romance is laughably bad, and the rest was patchy. I enjoyed the one-off humorous lines. I enjoyed meeting interesting individuals in an interesting world. I was really intrigued and talking to lots of npcs when I started. I met all of the squad members. I remember the Hanar and the Elcor races fondly. It was a cool introduction to the Asari and Quarians. But the large percentage time spent in tedious combat, and the times it was unclear where I was supposed to go or who I was supposed to talk to, overshadow that. Mass Effect 2 and 3 do everything better. A best case scenario might be playing ME1 for an hour or four, until you explore the Citadel and are able to leave on the Normandy. Then stop.

The story is Mass Effect 1 is easily passed up, I hardly remember the parts I played. I made it to half of chapter 3. (meaning I missed the critical, possibly interesting conclusions, for this chapter and beyond.) The choices were interesting in principle, but dadadadun! You can play the Mass Effect 2 comic! It'll take about 15 minutes, none of the headache, and 50% of the story goodness. You'll miss making full sets of choices, and all of the fun dialogue is gone, but, yes. It is worth the trade.

Whiiiich appears to cost way more than it should. (it was given to me) I hear there is a save editor "Gibbed's ME2 Save Editor."

Mass Effect 2 is so much better. It fills you in just fine. Go forward from there. (you can still make your own choices a bit in the comic/save editor) Mass Effect 3 is yet another exponential leap improved beyond 2. Don't miss those games because this one is so hard to enjoy.