Recent reviews by etheriae

This game made me feel stupid.

Awesome alone, even better with a friend. Shout-out to everyone else who played co-op and adopted a side each forever

Absolute Cinema. Beef and Robert share a braincell and it bounces between them like a DVD logo. Also, sidenote, I adore how they wrote in nods to Robert working solo for years: "what's PTO?", insane pain tolerance, and an approach to situations that looks a little weird to an outsider but not to you. Honestly, what a game. I loved it. Cinematography? In your video game??? It's more likely than you think!

I'm going to start off by saying that this game is on the cusp. It's not actually bad - it runs smoothly even on a laptop, the sound design is good, and I didn't encounter any bugs during my time with it.

That said, it is unforgiving. There's no map, which wouldn't be an issue with a map this tiny, but you have no control over the camera and sometimes the way it swings around obscures the thing you're looking for as you run around. Animations for the net especially feel achingly slow; you click to start using the net, sit through a slow zoom into the character you were already looking at, and then accidentally miss the short green bar and have to sit as the game immediately cancels the whole thing and starts to slowly, slowly zoom you back out again. You can't click to cut off the zooms and just hold your net over the water again. You're guaranteed about five solid seconds of waiting for a split-second mistake, and it feels unfair.

The playable character model is cool, but she never blinks. You wouldn't think that'd be what put me off, but using the net (the fishing is also fiddly and unforgiving but the net is moreso) means that she'll just hold the net over the water, staring directly into camera the entire time. Don't bother moving: she's looking right down the lens, and she sees all. Then you miss the green bar, she stares during the zooming process, you turn her away as a survival tactic, and then you successfully net a fish and she turns around to hold it up Animal Crossing-style, eyes drier than the Sahara. You cannot escape her gaze.

When you finally net yourself enough money to buy a fishing rod from the Don the Conman (I KNOW you have ONE spare rod in that shack for your best friend's family), that is also fiddly. All around the game, windows are too-small and are a pain to use - talking to people requires shifting around on the spot until you've satisfied the code that yes, you're definitely in their personal space, and yes, you're now subjecting them to the PC's unending stare from point blank range. Jura must also be conveniently close to a black hole, because every one of these people are just slightly too lanky. Fishing is similar- the rod is very long, the bobber is small, and the windows are unforgiving to the point where it becomes a Soulslike to hook one damned fish.

The mechanics of it feel either an homage or a remixed combination of several games. Animal Crossing, Spiritfarer, Webfishing, A Short Hike, Stardew Valley, probably more that I've forgotten. But where each of those feels fairly unique in itself, Isle of Jura just feels... borrowed. And where each of those games have depth and layers, the Isle of Jura unfortunately doesn't.

Stare or be stared at. Catch a few fish before you quit in sheer self-preservation, then go and play Celeste for more forgiving windows.

Slightly laggy on a laptop but mine is getting up there in years so honestly I can't blame the game there. Still definitely playable and definitely adorable. Short, sweet, and free, so you have no excuse! Stop checking reviews and grab it!

Super super cute, fun to play, but a lagfest on a laptop and has no graphics settings to ease it. Game itself, adorable, relaxing, baby moose naruto running through a forest, 10/10 other than the slideshow

My studio had more paint on it than my canvases. I painted an angel and took a photo with a waterlogged camera so that it glowed. I bought twelve spoons and a blowtorch, played with tools I don't have access to irl, and sold a ton of ♥♥♥♥-but-I-had-fun art. It's free and definitely worth it. Occasionally got framedrops and my laptop did briefly kick the fans into a higher gear, but she didn't sing the song of her people, so you're probably fine with your setup.

Also, honourable mention to the view outside the window. The little taxi-pods and city blocks are such a tiny continuity detail with what is simply a few sentences of worldbuilding that many will skip over, but it's awesome.

Just isn't finished. It's buggy and makes no sense. Some of the jumps are so hard that you have to be pixel perfect, within a moving window, while actively dodging attacks the entire time. No.

I'm just colourblind enough that this probably classifies as some kind of self-punishment, but I also draw and create and PF does really well at exercising my brain and getting me thinking about colour combinations, mixes, and gradients. The colourways range from vibrant jeweltones to close-cousin pastels (which is what I struggle with, so F to me there), so there's a real mix of challenges, as well as a pro mode which spaces the tiles out so that you can't even compare them along the border. It's free, it's fun, it's finnicky, it's fantastic. I'm going to get every achievement or die trying.

The most standout thing about this game is the lack of an options menu.

You can't change any controls, volumes, or video settings - as a result I played through the entire game at various levels from painful slideshow to old chugging paddleboat. You can also knock objects over as you move (but only some), and the volume of those is far louder and more abrupt than the entire rest of the game, meaning that the biggest scares I got were from ... myself.

That said, the game has clearly tried very hard and is a creative project - and in parts it's beautiful (like the dust motes in the moonlight window at the start). It also does a decent job of setting an atmosphere, and in many areas the sound design is bang on. The coin flip noise as you transfer across realms is also a very nice choice.

But all told it feels like it's just trying very hard to squick me out. Flesh walls where I just went "oh, neat," maggots I thought were actually somehow kind of cute (so round!), and ominous red faces at the ends of corridors who, immediately, prove that they're actually very nice, really. The NPCs make animal-crossing style minecraft ghast sounds as they talk; half of them look almost identical; and there are, for some reason, about six separate storage rooms scattered across the map. There are also objects which you need to be able to jump on, which spin idly as you move them and cannot be controlled upright again. My chair glitched into the ground and I had to jump-and-click several times per object off of the peak of the new floor installation.

The doors were my biggest enemy. ♥♥♥♥ the doors.

TL;DR: this game is a fantastic effort by a small team of people and a ton of hard work that unfortunately overstays its welcome very early on almost purely due to the lack of optimisation or clientside optimisation. I say almost purely because there is a solid 5% of this review that would rather peel her own eyebrows off instead of struggle with another door. That said, it is free and if you have a decent PC you probably won't run into as many issues as I did. A thumbs down feels harsh but I just can't recommend it as it is.