Reader reviews for Ether One
Ether One
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Sometimes tough, interesting story, still felt a bit short
Objectively, this game wasn’t short and had some very tough, non-intuitive puzzles. But they fit with the environment and it was beautiful and worked as a story. Sometimes the commentary got a bit repetitive, especially when you were moving back and forth looking for missing bits to solve puzzles. Every puzzle can be solved, although sometimes they are very tricky. But at the end I was left wanting… more meat. Definitely worth playing, but it lacked a bit of… cohesion that would make it feel like a complete game, I guess.
Much better, in my opinion, than similar exploration games like Dear Esther and Gone Home, but I think it could still have used additional scripting.
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Time Played: 10-20 hours
Good attempt at this genre.
Play time ~ 22 hours (until I ran in to the bugs that blocked my progress and when I gave up due to some of the “why would I do that” puzzles).
This game is more about exploration than puzzle solving, although it does have a fair number of puzzles and some of which are fairly good.
It has decent voice acting, although sometimes hard to understand behind the static-radio quality; it seemed intentional but degraded the experience a bit for me.
I would also have liked a bit more music in the background; as opposed to the emptiness and eeriness that is in the game now.
The game boasts the potential to raise awareness of dementia which is a noble cause. However, it also has storytelling that tells of violence; to make it worse, it is told in a way that is like being told to children, which doesn’t seem very family friendly…
Lastly, The puzzles range from mind-numbing easy to “why would I think to do that”. To make things worse, several of the puzzles are bugged and I could not restore all the projectors because of it, this is very frustrating. FYI, here are some (WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER):
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BrimCliff Mines: DO NOT EXIT this area when you are doing the reels puzzle, otherwise a reset will cause you to lose a reel. Similarly for the Bible puzzle.
Pinwheel Village: When doing the piano quest, the rope pulling wasn’t working for me. To finish the Export area projector, you need a sharp object. If you had previously got rid of your broken bottle or previously already used the Presser machine in the Brewery, you may be at a loss…
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Time Played: Over 20 hours
Difficulty: Hard