It's interesting to see what kind of mindset influenced this game's design. Because it feels almost schizophrenic, if you get my drift. No wonder it was made by Phil Fish.
I mean, it's a charming game with some clever puzzles and also some brilliantly designed visuals based around making 3D graphics look like 2D pixel art (and succeeding even if you ignore the perspective trick and look at the art in its 3D form), and it has some great music and a fantastic atmosphere, but aside from that, there really isn't much else to it. The plot is literally "something broke, go fix it" (the big cube at the beginning practically says as much if you translate its dialogue), and everything else about the 'narrative' makes absolutely no sense, and the endings are basically a fancy way of telling the player "you're winner". There's literally no meaning to anything, and if there was supposed to be any, it's ridiculously obfuscated to the point where you might as well not even bother trying.
Oh, and 100% completion is almost impossible without a walkthrough unless you're a rocket scientist for NASA. There are ways of creating hard puzzles without forcing players to look up incredibly obscure languages and other crap, and one of the puzzles is so vauge and doesn't seem to even have a hint that it was outright brute-forced. And Fish claims not all the puzzles have been solved yet. It reeks of an ego who can't resist trying to prove how fucking smart he is that he is more than happy to throw good game design out the window for it. What the fuck.
In short, on one half, we have a beautiful, cleverly designed title, and that half deserves to be played. The other half is incomprehensible gibberish that is happy to discard all notions of good game design for its creator's ego without even resulting in anything meaningful, taking True Art Is Incomprehensible to its logical conclusion. Which is a shame, because this game feels like it had the potential to be so much more.
Videogame Great visuals and music, and the regular puzzles are nice, everything else is perplexing (and not in a good way).
It's interesting to see what kind of mindset influenced this game's design. Because it feels almost schizophrenic, if you get my drift. No wonder it was made by Phil Fish.
I mean, it's a charming game with some clever puzzles and also some brilliantly designed visuals based around making 3D graphics look like 2D pixel art (and succeeding even if you ignore the perspective trick and look at the art in its 3D form), and it has some great music and a fantastic atmosphere, but aside from that, there really isn't much else to it. The plot is literally "something broke, go fix it" (the big cube at the beginning practically says as much if you translate its dialogue), and everything else about the 'narrative' makes absolutely no sense, and the endings are basically a fancy way of telling the player "you're winner". There's literally no meaning to anything, and if there was supposed to be any, it's ridiculously obfuscated to the point where you might as well not even bother trying.
Oh, and 100% completion is almost impossible without a walkthrough unless you're a rocket scientist for NASA. There are ways of creating hard puzzles without forcing players to look up incredibly obscure languages and other crap, and one of the puzzles is so vauge and doesn't seem to even have a hint that it was outright brute-forced. And Fish claims not all the puzzles have been solved yet. It reeks of an ego who can't resist trying to prove how fucking smart he is that he is more than happy to throw good game design out the window for it. What the fuck.
In short, on one half, we have a beautiful, cleverly designed title, and that half deserves to be played. The other half is incomprehensible gibberish that is happy to discard all notions of good game design for its creator's ego without even resulting in anything meaningful, taking True Art Is Incomprehensible to its logical conclusion. Which is a shame, because this game feels like it had the potential to be so much more.