This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
The game is essentially a maze book you'd buy from an airport store to kill time between flights but instead of flipping to the next page to get to the next puzzle, you walk around a pretty landscape.
The art style is very similar to Zelda: Breath of the Wild so that's a huge positive. Looks clean, vibrant and I never had any frame rate drops or other issues. I got a Myst "vibe" from the game in that you're walking around a seemingly abandoned, silent island with different puzzles to solve that, in turn, play their own part in solving a bigger mystery.
But all throughout playing it I couldn't shake the feeling that this game was just a generic maze book you'd buy for a few bucks to pass the time between connecting flights at an airport. The mazes are definitely challenging so if you like good puzzles, I'd definitely recommend it. But if you're looking for anything more than a conglomeration of puzzles where you walk from puzzle to puzzle instead of turning a page or hitting "next," then I think you'll be highly disappointed. They incorporate some of the aspects of the world into solving some of the puzzles but overall they just seem derivative. "How do we make a maze harder? Make it so you can't see where your line is! Need some more challenge? Make it so you need to look through different colored panes of glass to reveal the correct path!" It feels as if the devs really wanted to make a really good maze game (which they did) and then realized that not many people will buy a game of mazes, let alone for more than $10 so they created an island for you walk around on in an attempt to make it seem like it's more than a maze game.
Most of the challenge of the game ultimately comes down to how quickly you realize which item in the open world corresponds to the maze. Once you realize that the maze (and most of the mazes around it) reference the same object, they become child's play. For example [SPOILERS], there's a group of mazes in an apple orchard. As soon as you realize the puzzle solution is based off of a tree that has an apple on one branch, it just becomes tracing the tree branch on your maze...and the next 5 mazes too. So it's just looking at a tree, tracing, going to the next, looking at the tree, tracing, etc. Another, requires you to box alike colors together before reaching the end of the maze. The next step up from this is to use colored panes of glass to view the maze so that the correct colors are showing. My points is that most of the ideas the devs came up with the make the mazes harder seem like things that were just spit out during a random brainstorming session: "Ok, how can we make a maze, one of the oldest types of puzzles in human society, and make it a bit more challening? Ooh! Have the solution be tracing an object in the open world! Have a pane of glass show the solution if you look through it!" None of the ideas struck me as organic or even original.
It's not a bad game, it just isn't much more than a $5 book with a pretty picture. If you go into the game knowing that solving top-down mazes is 99.9% of what you are doing here then you will most likely enjoy your experience. But if you're going into it thinking it'll be anything remotely similar to other puzzle games with "open worlds" like Portal, then you'll be highly disappointed. The open world is not even close to being necessary and only serves as a pretty lobby to walk around in between solving mediocre mazes.… Expand
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