Review of RHEM by Houie

Great start to a hopefully promising series. The game takes some getting used to if you play a lot of story driven games. But, please give it a try if you enjoy adventure games that are heavy on the puzzle side.

The best part of the game is that puzzles are always logical and done in very intricate ways. The satisfaction from solving puzzles is tremendous because the solution always makes sense. The world is vast to explore and so you will never feel trapped.

For being developed by one person, this game is most excellent. The graphics are not the most enticing / fantastical but they are well rendered for the time of when the game was developed (640x480). So in the graphics department the game could have been improved. At the very least, more diversity in the environment would have been nice. One must say the graphics serve a very functional purpose. In order to facilitate the intricate logical puzzles, perhaps the graphics need to be designed in this, but I can’t help but think it could have been prettier.

Regarding audio: bring your own music because there is none. I was listening to sky.fm and cranked up some New Age music which sort of suited the game. This made the game much more enjoyable. The in-game sounds are very functional and serve the purpose of giving audio queues to the user of when certain things happen.

Story: Very minimal. This is also another area the game could have improved on. At least add a bit here and there between puzzles to vary the gameplay; that would have been nice. Although, not having much of a story is good in that the game doesn’t present any immoral issues that story based games often give.

The game is non-violent and family friendly, which is awesome.