Ratings by Stevens R. Miller

This is a minimalist take on the same theme that Croteam developed so well (and so much more fully) in their acclaimed “The Talos Principle.” Aegon Games stripped away almost everything non-essential to the same kind of put-this-there-then-move-that-here-then-stand-on-this kind of puzzle that defined Talos. That includes any kind of narrative soundtrack or written story, all possible explanation for what you are doing and why, and even texture and bump maps. What’s left is a pristine environment that will remind you of the Apple Store, or the scenes with Buck Henry in “Heaven Can Wait.”

That all works out pretty well, though, if what you liked best about “Talos” were those what-if-I-do-this-first-and-then-that-second puzzles. Some story would have been nice, and there is just enough non-essential material in place to suggest that there could actually be one. You may spend the entire game thinking you are on the verge of deciphering What It’s All About, but you’ll never actually do it. But that’s okay, if you like this kind of puzzle. Somehow, the absence of any overarching theme doesn’t hurt it much. The puzzles are a great follow-up to the definitive giant of this genre, so go ahead and enjoy them on their own merits.

Somnambulant score is initially pretty dreamy and really sets the mood. But it gets monotonously repetitive before the end. Kind of like the game itself, you may start to expect it will develop into something more than it does. If it really ends up bugging you, mute your PC and play your “Enya” CDs instead. (Don’t deny it. If you are thinking of playing this game, there is Enya in your music library.)

We never hit a bug or had any technical problems with “Rodinia.” Here and there, a walkthrough might help you when you get stuck. But pretty much all of the puzzles are about the same level of difficulty, and comparable to those in Talos. Nearly no ninja skills required. We found only one level that called for a timed jump to solve it and, who knows, maybe there’s a solution we didn’t discover that doesn’t need it?

Recommended if you like this kind of game at all.

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Time Played: 10-20 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

We love Talos/Portal style puzzle games. They take no ninja skills where precisely timed jumping or dodging is necessary to avoid dying and respawning some number of steps back so you can enjoy the everlasting pleasures of jumping and dying, jumping and dying, jumping and dying and respawning again and again and again, for all eternity.

We hear some people like these. We don’t.

Talos and Portal both had a wee bit of jumping, but nothing really challenging. That aspect was more part of the puzzles you had to solve with your brain than it was a physical challenge. Same here for the first 37 levels of Lightmatter. The goal is to figure out how to position lights that shine in ways that open up safe passages, when you only have two or three of them. You sometimes have to jump over a gap, but it is always easy and the point is that the gap limits where you can put the lights.

In a clever variation on the light mechanic, you will also get to use a kind of receptor that creates pathways by connecting a beam from a fixed source. Again, it’s very clever. If you like the put-this-here-then-put-that-there-then-move-this-over-and-step-on-that kind of puzzle that we like, you are going to love the first 37 levels of Lightmatter. They all follow that structure and, on top of that, there is a funny story presented with excellent voice acting and a great sound-track. Whole thing pays tribute to its primary inspiration rather explicitly too, which is kind of cool. Great game.

Until everything goes to hell on Level 38. There are no lamps. There are no receptors. Instead, there is jumping and dying, jumping and dying, jumping and dying and respawning again and again and again, for all eternity. That’s because, for the first and only time in the entire game, you can’t just take your time and think. You have to jump NOW and then jump NOW AGAIN and sometimes you have to RUN OR DIE RIGHT NOW! What had been a purely intellectual game, played at a sedate pace where, if you want to, you can noodle it out with a partner (that’s how we do it, with the one of us who can’t ever seem to understand how to use the controls making suggestions on how to solve puzzles to the other one who can, somewhat, manage the navigation issues), became a pure parkour game more like Mirror’s Edge than the sliding cars and trucks of the classic puzzle, “Rush Hour.”

Now, here’s the thing: we know lots of people love parkour games. Heck, Mirror’s Edge has 17,000 reviews on Steam, where it is rated “Very Positive.” We even tried that one but, like all parkour games, we can’t play it. One of us has just never been able to master the gamepad and the other is over 60, has imperfect eyesight, and lacks the reflexes you need. Mirror’s Edge looks great, but parkour games are just non-starters for us.

So, we were particularly delighted not only to find Lightmatter, but to discover you get to play the first hour for free. We think all adventure games should offer that, so you know for sure if it runs on your machine, matches your skills, and is what you really want to buy. Lightmatter’s first hour scored 100% on all such measures. And it kept on delivering all the way through its penultimate level. Pure intellectual puzzling at its best.

Then you get to the final level, and find out you’ve been had. We simply couldn’t get through it. And it’s long, which is what the final level ought to be. Oh, did we mention there is no inter-level save option? If you “save” your game, you are starting the current level over from the beginning the next time you play. So even if you manage to jump, die, jump, die, jump, live (my God!) and make it to the next and maybe even the next obstacle after that, you have to keep going (or leave the game running) until you get to the very end, or lose all progress on the final level.

Well, we just couldn’t do it. We even watched a good walkthrough where, as with all parkour walkthroughs, the player seemed to have no trouble precisely timing jumps that, for us, were nearly impossible. Some of the obstacles don’t just take you back one jump when you respawn after dying, either. This means, when you die again, you can even die sooner in that series of jumps than when you died the time before. What fun, eh?

Okay, lots of people like parkour games. If you are one of them and you also like puzzlers, Lightmatter is your dream come true. If you are like us, and simply can’t get through parkour games (or just don’t like them), be warned: that free hour misleads you into thinking you can finish Lightmatter without any ninja skills. You’ll need them. And, given that the story is a big mystery, which makes you really want to find out how it ends, being able to play all the way through the last level will be something you badly want to do. We tried. And died. And tried. And died. Over and over, until we had to “finish” the game by watching a video of someone else doing it.

Picking a score for this game was hard. For 37 levels, it deserves a solid top rating of five-out-of-five. Then you get the rug pulled out from under you with a level that you may not be able to play at all because it becomes a wholly different game than the one you thought you paid for. That’s a zero, in our book. So we split the difference and gave it a 2.5, with the title you see above.

Lightmatter pays tribute to its inspiration almost brilliantly. But in that inspiration, the cake was the lie. In Lightmatter, the lie is the game itself.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

Excellent game design and puzzles make this a good fit into the Talos/Myst genre. The ramp-up on puzzle complexity was pretty good. So were the models and sound. There is no text or speech at any point, which is actually kind of cool.

We got a good 20 hours of play out of it, though some of that was because we had to run around quite a bit trying to solve whatever would generate the next checkpoint. This game has no manual save feature, which is kind of annoying if you only have ten minutes for playing.

Now, as good as this game is, it really needed more play-testing and debugging. There were no show-stoppers that we saw, and we didn’t see any mentioned in the discussions. However, there are some problems that do interfere with play. For example, some of the in-game menu choices suffer from some kind of “racing” effect, making it impossible to select a menu choice other than at random. You eventually get the one you want, but it’s not right to ship a game with this kind of defect. (The problem only appears with our XBox 360 controller, not when you use the mouse/keyboard. But who wants to play this kind of game with a mouse/keyboard when you have a controller?)

Some of the in-game animation had very visible bugs (the carts in the mines when they return from a failed attempt to reach their destinations). This is no impediment to play, but, again, it seems like this should have been fixed before shipping day. Other bugs included: we lost an object we were carrying during a teleport; we were able to proceed without it, but why? There is no access to prior checkpoints; you can only reload your latest saved game. At least one puzzle involving the carts was “solved” by resort to a walk-through, but the solution made no sense; it worked, so we used it, but it did not match what we understood and successfully applied about the puzzle to solve it in several other, similar, cases.

Still, in spite of the bugs, we had a very good time playing this game. Some experience with Boolean logic helps, but is not essential. And, despite what some negative reviewers have said, there is much more to this game than just AND / OR / XOR / NOT.  Also, next to no ninja skills required (a bit of jumping, but you respawn quickly and in nearly the spot where you died). We hate ninja skills, so that was a plus for us.

All in all, a very good entry. Devs seem highly responsive and helpful, which forgives a bit of the bugginess and probably means that, over time, most of the bugs will go away. Eager to see what Sticky Stone does next.

(Ignore what Steam says about some players racking up insane hours of play; in our case, that was because we had to leave the house for a while, and hadn’t reached a checkpoint, so we just left it running.)

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Time Played: Over 20 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

We played this game on a PC. It has bugs. That’s a shame because it looks like it will be a pretty good game when they get the bugs out. No need to list them all (you can find some discussion of them on the Steam Store pages). Here are two we encountered: First, you can remap the keyboard, but the settings lose effect after you exit, then continue, the game. The settings you choose (like assigning the up arrow to mean “move forward”) are still visible in the Options menu, but the original settings (like the “W” key meaning “move forward”) are back. This is frustrating because you might not remember what those settings even were (like the tab key opening your inventory). Second, we had some problems moving a gem (or “amulet”) around, as though it somehow combined two of them into one, and changed its size. Not sure if that was intended, but shortly after that, a cryptic text message appeared on the screen as a kind of overlay. It had the word “Error” in it. Pretty certain this was not game-play but, instead, an error message the player ought never to see. Other players report other bugs. The developer responds quickly, but the responses are all, “Thanks for letting us know!” when they should be, “We’ll tell Steam to refund your money and we’ll post here when the debugged version is ready!”

Now this is all very disappointing because the same people created “The Initiate,” which is a fine game of a similar type. We never found a bug in “The Initiate,” and that one came out two years before “Room 208.” That’s just not acceptable in a commercial product.

As for the game itself, it is a point-and-click puzzler akin to (no surprise) “The Initiate.” The trailer does a good job of letting you know what it’s like. Couple of things aren’t apparent in the trailer, though. You need to use some inventory items that have limited resources, so a lot of your time is going to be spent on replenishing those resources. Some players might like the “walls are closing in” feeling that gives you, but we think it just distracts from solving the puzzles and the overall mystery of the story. A similar mechanic builds a kind of threat level as you move away from safe areas and stay too long in dangerous ones. You have to keep an eye on it and move back to safe areas (or use some inventory items for temporary safety) to avoid the consequences. Again, that kind of limitation might appeal to some people, but not those of us who liked the pure puzzle solving of games like “Quern” and “Myha.”

If you like puzzle/mystery games and don’t mind (or even like) having to cope with limited time and space issues, this game would be for you. But not until they get the bugs out.

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Time Played: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: Hard

The lowest score you can give at “Adventure Gamers” is 0.5 stars. I’m giving this one 1.0 stars because it has great imagery. Lots of it. Endless metric tonnes of it.

And that’s all.

You wander, wander, and wander some more. Nothing happens. There are no puzzles and you can’t interact with anything in a meaningful way. You do hear some letters read aloud.

Now, this appears to be exactly what a lot of people want, as “Dear Esther” has been quite a commercial and critical success. That worries me. The sort of person I imagine liking this non-game appears in my imagination as depressed, lonely, possibly even suicidal. Is that really what gamers are like? I hope not. I don’t see myself that way, but I didn’t like “Dear Esther,” so I must not be typical.

There has been endless debate about whether or not this is even a game. I won’t go there. But I will say whatever else it is or isn’t, it’s not an “adventure” game. In those games, something happens. In this, nothing happens.

Where’s the adventure in that?

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Time Played: 1-2 hours
Difficulty: Very Easy

We paid $15 for it and will start by saying it is a good game but overpriced at that amount. We do recommend it because it played well and was generally satisfying, but we suggest you wait for a sale. Compared to others, this should be about a five-dollar game. We got about three hours out of it. The endings are all reasonable, though you can die (and be respawned), which gets a little boring.

We played with a controller and screen, not in VR.

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Time Played: 2-5 hours
Difficulty: Easy

Impressive attempt to do a science-fiction “Myst” game, but it just doesn’t work. Navigation is awkward and slow. Looong diary entries are dreary and slow to get through (actor actually seems to be reading them in a deliberately slow paced voice), and they don’t really help. Puzzles were uneven and, in some cases, seemed to be operating at random (they probably weren’t, but there is a reasonable assumption in games like these that, when the problem is to line things up a certain way, you can rely upon basic interactions to work for you, but they don’t in this game).

All in all, a valiant, but failed, effort.

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Time Played: 2-5 hours

People classify games like this one as being akin to “Portal,” “Talos,” “Witness,” and a few others. Those comparisons are valid, but we like to compare all such games to the sliding block puzzle marketed as “Rush Hour.” You have to shove 1x2, 1x3, and sometimes 1x4 “cars,” “trucks,” and “buses” along a cartesian grid, trying to figure out how to get one of them out of an opening on one side of a square game board. In “Talos,” the process came to be called “juggling.” Once you get the idea, “juggling” is both recognizable, and a relevant skill, in a lot of games. This is one of them, and it is a great deal of fun (if, of course, you like that kind of thing).

The story here is adequate, but the purpose of the game is the puzzles. One wonders how much difference story makes to the fun overall. Well, included with the game proper is a prototype level that is as bare-bones as it can be. The puzzles in that level are identical in how you play/solve them to what’s in the game. At first, it seemed a little austere. But, once you get immersed in the problem, you tend to forget that there’s no story, nor decorations. So… the story helps, but it’s really just a starting point.

Indeed, the title of the game does suggest that there’s an overarching question about the nature of thought and existence. Thus, as the game plays out and the story unfolds, you expect an answer. Like a lot of games where the emphasis is on the journey, and not the arrival, this one fails to provide a fully satisfying ending. But when you get there and see how it does end, ask yourself what could have been any better. The play’s the thing, after all, as it always is.

So we loved this one because we love “Rush Hour” games, and this is a very good “Rush Hour” game. It is strictly linear. You go from Puzzle N to Puzzle N+1, with no turning back, ever. That, again, might bother those who want more dramatic depth, but we thought it was a good way to deliver a sense of progress. Returning to places you’ve already visited to solve previously unsolvable puzzles can work (as in “Talos”), but it isn’t necessary and, unless done with precision, leads to a lot of tedious running around for no reason. The decision not to include that amount of complexity was a good one here. You get your puzzles, one after the other, and that’s good enough.

If you like the “Rush Hour” family, this is for you.

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Time Played: 10-20 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

Imagine the Room series with a bit more story and a bit more navigational freedom. That’s “House of Da Vinci.” Visuals and puzzles look like they were created by the same talent. But you actually get to roam around, as all adventure games should let you do. This creates much more of a sense of realism than the (nonetheless excellent) Room series that appears to be so much of Da Vinci’s inspiration.

Here’s hoping there will be a Da Vinci II!

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right

If you’re reading this then you almost certainly played Room and Room 2, which means you liked Room enough to want more. You won’t be disappointed by Room 3. It is exactly what you have come to expect from the series. The visuals are, again, amazing. The story is, again, a bit thin. The puzzles are, again, interesting, but typically not very complicated. The joy of the series seems to be in the compelling realism of some of the most ridiculous contraptions ever imagined. No one would ever build the gizmos and thingamajigs you get to use. But, if they did, you know they’d look exactly as they do here. Somehow, that makes this more fun than you might expect. Unless you’ve played the first two.

Which, it appears, you have. So you know what to expect and, almost certainly, that’s what you want. Go play!

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Time Played: 10-20 hours
Difficulty: Easy

Lavish, relaxing, and challenging. This is another successful star in the constellation of Myst-inspired adventure games. Respectfully shameless borrowing from Talos, Portal, and even Antichamber blends with original elements to be exactly What You Were Looking For when you searched for more of what those games did best. The puzzles ramp up in complexity gradually, keeping play in the perfect challenge/reward channel that holds interest while avoiding either boredom or frustration. In an important departure from most games that manage to do that, this one doesn’t just make the later puzzles more complex. They do get harder, but a lot of the unlocking you do towards the end requires making sense of the setting as much as it requires figuring out the solution. That is, the environment is so rich with vegetation, structures, pathways, etc., that you will sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed at first encounter with a new puzzle. But, walking around and taking stock of what’s there will let you grasp each such situation fairly quickly. This becomes a significant part of how you’ll solve the most complex problems in the latter part of the game and it adds a lot to your sense of satisfaction. You’re not just coping with a long series of logic problems. Instead, you’re exploring your situation, learning what you need to know, and then dealing with what’s around you. We liked that.

Now, the developers have said they are coping with marketing problems. At the same time, they seem to think that a lot of those problems arise from us non-VR players thinking this game is only for VR, while their marketing materials seem to emphasize almost nothing but VR. I wish they’d stop doing that, but it seems they are deep into some kind of relationship with Sony and the PS/4, so maybe Sony is to blame for the over-emphasis on VR. Whatever the reason, let me be as clear as I can on this:

THIS GAME IS GREAT WITHOUT VR!

If like you liked Myst, Talos, Eyes of Ara, Myha, or any of the other adherents to the first-person wandering walking-sim religion, this is for you.

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Time Played: 10-20 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

The point-and-click genre is not dead, no matter what the thousand-credit AAA shops want us to believe. But that doesn’t mean even the good ones are worth paying for when there is so much free material of decent quality out there. “The Search” falls into the category of games that should be free, but isn’t. We played at a leisurely rate and still completed it (including all variations on the ending) in 90 minutes. Compare that to “The Treasure,” by Kotorinosu (a free point-and-click game that some players actually complained was too long).

“The Search” showcases the impressive talent of its creator, Jason Godbey, who makes his living making highly detailed, nearly photo-realistic 3D environments. The soundtrack and voice acting are professionally done. Whole thing is enjoyable, if a bit heavy-handed with its messaging (lot of philosophical conclusions you won’t necessarily agree with, but they are not important to the play of the game). But my bottom line is that it doesn’t justify even the low price (four bucks) we paid for it, given the alternatives.

He has another game up for release in 2019 (“Discolored”). We’ll have a look, but I think he’d do better if Jason gave “The Search” away for free, and offered it as proof he’s worth some Kickstarter money to add staff and create a more substantive product.

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Time Played: 1-2 hours

I mostly agree with the AG reviewer, but will respectfully dissent about the cave. Yes, it’s a wee bit tedious. It didn’t take long to solve, though, and I would disagree that it is a disavowed (or otherwise blacklisted) category. But it does feel a little out of place in this game.

Mostly, “The Initiate” is a hide-and-seek game where the “solution” to most of its puzzles requires looking around until you find something. Putting what you find to use is typically easier than finding it was. The cave actually was a real puzzle, albeit not a hard one. So, it is a bit jarring to the mind to suddenly shift from an egg-hunt to something more akin to that 4x4 plastic toy with the fifteen little tiles you slide around.

Graphically, it’s pretty impressive. Considering the short credit roll, maybe a lot of the models came from the Unity Asset Store. The designer(s) did a successful job of creating a consistent look, and it’s a high quality look overall. Nothing ever takes you out of the story due to the imagery. The story is, like this review says, both thin and familiar. But that’s rather an indication just how reliable this genre is, when you get the game-play right.

The wife and I loved Myst, Edith Finch, and Gone Home. This is in that family, so we liked it too.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Just Right