And oh I have words about this one. It isn't the worst game ever, it definitely had enough to it to keep me playing all day today. The puzzles in chapter 4 and 5 were finally a step up. The optional ones in 4 were actually tricky. But man oh man, the game undermines itself at every single turn.
That image up there along with the platinum non-image is showing the bit at the top that tells you you can look at hints in the pause menu. This appears if you stand still in a level for too long. This is fine by itself but that screen is the literal end of the game. It's beyond the final puzzle. I stood too long listening to their insipid fucking cat and it gave me the hint prompt after.
And that is the issue in a nutshell. This game has NO faith in the player. Not in their puzzling ability and not even in their ability to notice basic things. Like what a hub world is. Oh, only one of the three teleporters in this hub is working, it must mean there's "a structured path through this place". Oh, you've stopped to take a break and think? You can get hints you know! Did you see the train to the next hub world that the camera is literally pointing at? Yes? Well, Jessie is gonna witter on about it anyway! Oh, you're looking at the teleporter you can't get to? Jessie/Cait will immediately chime in with a hint or talk about how complicated this puzzle is. It's infuriating. Cait even, at several points, asked if I was enjoying myself!! Leave me alone and I might actually have time to, ffs!!
People said it got better because Jessie stops talking to you all the time but they replace her with the fucking cat who calls you a special smart bean every time you solve an easy puzzle. I wanted to turn voices and even subtitles off, but I did want to listen to the audio logs! Those on their own are more than enough to build the world, Jessie and Cait are superfluous at best and actively detrimental at worst. Cait literally at one point states that "I'm sure you've noticed that Mirren did this" and YES I HAD ACTUALLY, it wasn't subtle!! The epitome of telling instead of showing.
Oh, and voice lines replay when you redo levels, which I did for trophies. I turned both the audio and subtitles off for that so I didn't have to suffer a second time.
The actual puzzle design is very basic. There's a decent mechanic in here but it only really got interesting when it started copying other games, like Superliminal's illusion type puzzles. Otherwise they really don't like to make it too complicated. There's a distinct fear in ever letting the player get stuck, so it never really takes its interesting puzzle ideas to their limits.
Also the final puzzle kinda sucks? You have a 5 minute time limit and you will have to redo it at least once because it's hard to solve 10 puzzles in a row that quickly without seeing them before hand. And a lot of them are much easier if you photo stuff in early parts of it and take it with you to a later section, which isn't exactly something you can do without knowing what's coming.
I don't ever really like being under a time limit, but I especially hate it for puzzles. This game even has a rewind function but for this puzzle it doesn't reset the timer. This would be a perfectly fine puzzle if it didn't have a time limit, so once you hit a later puzzle and realize you needed something from earlier and scoot back and forth using rewind as part of the puzzle solving for once. Instead it's better to just restart rather than eat 2 minutes of time loss.
Overall this game is... Fine? I have no idea why it was so highly rated and even nominated for game awards. I know those don't matter or make sense but, still, it's a distinctly 6-7/10 game gameplay wise that is dragged down to a 5 with it's terrible narration.
I should probably stop ranting now. I'm pretty disappointed with the game overall but I got it on sale so I don't feel like it was a waste of money or time or anything. Glad it wasn't longer than a few hours, it would have outstayed it's welcome if it was longer. I also wouldn't recommend this game to puzzle game fans though, it just doesn't have enough meat to it.
