Recent reviews by BinarySplit

It's like Gone Home in space. There are a few puzzles here and there, but most of the game will be spent exploring the ship, listening to audio logs, speculating about what has happened, and admiring the awesome level of detail in all the various objects scattered around the living quarters, etc.

If you enjoy experiencing settings that actually feel "lived in", where culture and technology has clearly left its mark on the world, even though it's not vital to the gameplay, then you'll enjoy The Station.

The one downside - the undiscounted price is really expensive for what it is. I beat it in 90 minutes, and I feel like I experienced everything it had to offer. Wait for a sale.

I didn't enjoy it, but you might. The Eyes of Ara is incredibly well made, and is full of amazing puzzle design. It's very similar to Myst, Riven, URU, etc. but has modern production values and a lot of polish. If you have enjoyed the Myst series, buy this. You'll love it.

Why didn't I enjoy it? For the same reason I didn't enjoy Myst or Riven, and had trouble with Uru. It's brutally hard. It's not a game for the impatient or attention-deficient. The puzzles are well designed, but the clues for the puzzles are hidden throughout the environment, and some of them are really hard to find. In a couple cases, I spent over 15 minutes searching for something even though I knew exactly what it was and what room to look in (thanks to the walkthrough). I ultimately found that the excellent puzzles weren't enough to make up for the tedious clue-finding aspect.

Why do I still recommend it? Because it's clear it was an absolute gem of a game. It wasn't to my liking, but there were so many things about it that stood out as being exceptional within the genre. From the many hidden areas and optional side-puzzles to the extra Halloween and Christmas content, it's clear how much effort and love has been put into this game.

Generally well put together, good puzzle design, interesting story, good graphics. If you've enjoyed puzzle games that look like this, you'll certainly enjoy this too.

Caveat: I wouldn't recommend this to beginners in the puzzle genre - at time of writing there's no hint system and no walkthroughs, so it's easy to get stuck. I'd recommend starting with The House of Da Vinci or The Room 1, and coming back to Machinika Museum later.

I had to refund this. IDK what most of the game is like, but the cube puzzles didn't seem particularly interesting and two things were really ruining my enjoyment:

1. The head bobbing while walking is really exaggerated, can't be turned off and quickly gave me a headache. Other people reported this in the forums 9 months ago but the developer hasn't responded at all.

2. The story is told to you through voice clips, but if you want to listen to them you have to sit patiently and wait for them to play out. If you start walking toward the next puzzle, they'll end and you might miss part of the story. This is just unnecessarily tedious when there are ~3 voice clips per puzzle, you have to stop and wait for each one, and they speak unnaturally slowly.

Interesting, challenging, satisfying puzzles.

If you've played The Room, you already know what the gameplay is like. The House of Da Vinci gives you even more of it. I finished it in 6.5 hours, which means it's ~3x as long as The Room 1, or ~2x as long as The Room 2.

It looks great, but sadly it's actually super boring. This game has no respect for your time. I've no idea how long it is, but my playtime so far has been ~20% play, ~80% waiting or grinding.

You'll spend most of your time holding W to fly in straight lines between places. You might think that the various upgrades to make you move faster will help with this, but they sync up with story progression making the effective play area proportionately larger. Once you get to mid-game it will take a minimum of 2 minutes of holding forward to get to each point of interest. Combine this with all the grindy resource collection and frankly this game is exhausting. There are not enough fun parts to balance out the boring parts.

I recommend you avoid this for now. Maybe check the reviews in 6 months to see if they've fixed the pacing.

The Room Two builds on everything that was great about the first game. Great puzzles and mystery themes with spectacular environmental design. Don't let my short playtime fool you, I used 4 hints (I'm a bit impatient), but even for a 3 hour game I'd happily pay full price again for another game like this.

If you loved The Room and The Room Two, skip this one. It's an unfortunate departure from the formula that made the first two The Room games amazing.

If you felt they were too hard and but really liked the incredible environmental design and pretty Rube Goldberg machines, then this is the game for you. They've massively increased the amount of that sort of content compared to the previous games.

I fall into the first camp. To me, this game was about 1 hour of puzzles, 4 hours of non-puzzle busywork, and half an hour of just waiting for the slow screen transitions. It was just such a slog to get through, and by the end I was audibly groaning every time there was an elaborate build up to a non-puzzle.

Fantastic puzzles with just the right amount of challenge. Don't wait for a sale, buy it now, you won't regret it

Fun and well-paced. The puzzles are just the right level of challenge, they weren't so easy to be boring, but I also never got stuck for too long.

I completed it in 3 hours, but approximately half of the game is split between 2 paths and I only played the blue path so I suspect the total amount of content is around 5 hours if you're a completionist. This is my only complaint about the game - I don't want to replay the easy parts just to get the last few bits of content, so I'm not going to see the red path puzzles.

Definite buy when on sale, but probably don't buy at full price - this wasn't as magical of an experience as some of the more expensive story-heavy puzzle games (Portal, Lightmatter, Outer Wilds), but when it's at a few bucks, this is absolutely worth your time & money.