Found this on game pass (which I keep meaning to cancel, but here we are). Holy. Shit.
It’s a cute little cell shaded board style game. Might be fun to toy around with… Maybe just a couple more tries…wait what…?
It’s a masterpiece. It’s genius. It’s madness. It’s like Myst shot up the 7th guest and started snorting riddles.
Did anyone else stumble into this labyrinth? I’m obsessed.
Fair warning: the rest of this post has mild player character capability spoilers and a judgemental tone. No mention of puzzles or solutions, just observations about how people are playing the game and some talk about my own experience with it.
spoiler
Uncle Herbie must be posthumously disappointed in so many parallel universes. Looking through this thread, many people are quitting before finding out there’s multiple methods of not just mitigating, but almost entirely removing the randomness of runs. It’s understandable to some degree, but it baffles me to see so many people not knowing about nigh infinite drafting rerolls, room rarity manipulation, items that literally do a function they’re implying isn’t in the game like automatic collection of common objects, and more.
spoiler
I had ready access to all this at 30~40 hours invested and some of the further puzzles really require them; unless you’re literally just looking up solutions to each puzzle as you encounter it I don’t see how you’d be wanting these things without encountering them outside of maybe not knowing what to do to get a magnifying glass to spawn. Patience with investigative process and understanding of the drafting pool seem to be lacking among people who heard the game was good and tried it on a whim.
Like Outer Wilds, this game involves a lot of reading and connecting the dots on one’s own. Unlike Outer Wilds, a lot of the puzzling happens outside the game entirely, providing you no in-game method of remembering things or solving some puzzles. Very early on, the game tells you to keep a notepad for it, and it quickly becomes more than a suggestion. In my hubris, I didn’t take any notes until a fair way into the game, and had to basically repeat some of my earlier forays to get information I had thought to be extraneous.
Anyway I’m approaching 120 hours spent and having a blast with it still. I feel like I’m approaching or in the late game, as some of the things I need to do involve having already solved and re-used info from previous puzzles, sometimes more than once.
spoiler
I’m aware of the electromagnet. I think it’s ridiculous you need to find a compass, a battery, and a workshop in order to make it work. By the time you have all those are you really going to run around the house to hoover up items? If you want it on another run is that what you’re waste a coat check slot on? Also, it doesn’t collect gems or dice, which is stupid. That’s something you should just get permanently at a certain point