Reader reviews for Lake Ridden

A beautiful game, a great 1st person environment to play in.

Overall a pretty good game but to me what keeps it from being great is a little lack of ambition (or work? or resources?) on the sides.

The main puzzles, the “story” ones are good and are a very strong point of the game.

But there are three other types of puzzles that keep repeating themselves (while varying in difficulty/solution) and have a casual feeling.

Some “doors” puzzles : although very simple, there aren’t too much of these, so it doesn’t matter much.

The “bonus boxes” puzzles : they are the only ones not needed to complete the game, so it’s not that bad but many gamers will want to crack them anyway, so their sameness is a bit of an annoyance (their nature too, to me).

The “Simon” puzzles (repeating a series of sound sequences) : those are mandatory to progress and don’t change a bit apart from the patterns they play.

It would have been nice to face different challenges, even simples ones, in place of these repetitions, and the game would have felt more full-fledge. It seems like they didn’t want or couldn’t put in the extra effort to do it.

Those side things could have been so much more and could have added some length and feeling of coherence and realism to the game, as they are supposed to have been created by a mad inventor.

There’s also some unecessary walking through the same paths again and again near the end. A minor flaw but one that reinforce the feeling of unfinished work, whether it is due to time, or resources constraints.

But even like that, the game won’t disappoint those who like puzzles well integrated in a story, and a nice setting.
Totally recommendable.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

Although dotted with a couple of tolerable flaws, this is a fine, relaxing game in the walking-sim/mystery genre. The developers say it’s not a walking sim, but we thought it was and why not? They also say it’s not a horror game. We agree on that point, but it is a bit spooky here and there. Just the right amount when you want chills, but not blood. It’s slightly akin to “Gone Home,” in that regard.

The trailer is an accurate sample of what game-play is like, so if you like the kind of game you recognize in that trailer, you’ll like this one. Negative comments have been that it has no manual save, and that you do a lot of walking long distances. We’ll add that you open a lot of empty containers and that some of the puzzles are a bit repetitive. But the overall story and environment are pretty entertaining.

The absence of a manual save means you have to live with the last checkpoint the game chose to save at when you restart. You only get a moment’s notice with a diskette icon in the upper right corner when it saves, and this made it a bit tricky because a similar icon in almost the same place indicates a scene is loading. You can confuse one for the other. (Also, how much longer are we going to use a diskette for an icon? You can hardly even buy them anymore.) We coped with that by running long distances which seemed to force a save, eventually. Yes, it was a bit annoying, but nowhere near enough of a problem to make us stop playing.

As for having to run back and forth to solve puzzles, we didn’t mind that. Now, we are not believers in the “that’s how it would be in real life” defense of a boring element in a sim. Games should be fun. If real life were as fun as games, we wouldn’t need games. However, in this case, the amount of retracing our steps required actually did feel like it added to the realism of the experience, and did so without being tedious. So we actually didn’t see this as a negative.

We did think the almost always empty containers got a bit dull but, again, not enough to ruin the game. The mystery unravels at a good pace, the environment is rich and interesting, and the soundtrack (music and acting) were very good. We think this one is a fine entry in the genre (whichever one or ones it’s in). If you like “Eyes of Ara,” “Quern,” “Xing,” “Myha,” or “Mind Path to Thalamus,” this is for you.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Easy

I really hope the AG-team will cover this game in a review. It really deserves it! I enjoyed myself greatly. Nice story, good music, good voice acting, nice graphics and most of all, fun puzzles…the whole shebang.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right