Vidar

Apparently this game is too buggy to play at the moment. I've had it crash out on me 3-4 times in the space of a couple of hours. When the game only saves at the end of each game day, that means you have to re-do the entire day.

The thing is, I WANT to reccommend this game, but I can't. The reasons; it has a lot of (gamebreaking) bugs and has been abandoned. I could never finish the game because I experienced a recurring bug at one particular point that I had no way to work around. I did get in contact with the creator, who responded and tried to help me at first, but eventually they just stopped responding and never fixed the issues. What I DID get to play was magnificent, and I absolutely loved it. The story, the mechanics, the pressure, the soundtrack, I enjoyed it all. I don't think everybody experiences the impassable bug, so you might be one of the lucky ones, but you'll have to risk it if you buy the game and be prepared to restart over and over again to avoid the ones you do encounter.

I had high hopes for Vidar, but my excitement quickly turned to disappointment upon encountering the numerous problems and crashes that plague this game. Even the most dedicated fans of puzzle games should approach Vidar with caution, as it suffers from various design flaws and technical issues. Allow me to elaborate on the key problems I experienced during my time with the game. Technical Difficulties: First and foremost, Vidar is prone to crashes, which makes for a frustrating and disheartening experience. In addition to these crashes, I also encountered issues with the game loading in the lower-right corner of my screen, rendering it nearly impossible to play. This is a serious problem that has yet to be addressed by the developers. Character Movement and Dialogue Woes: Continuing a saved game often resulted in my character moving at a painfully slow pace, with frequent pauses that hindered my progress through the game. The characters themselves suffer from repetitive dialogue that quickly becomes tedious, such as one character repeatedly saying "Flies on Horse Sh*t." Timed Puzzles and Unreliable Save System: Every puzzle in Vidar is timed, which makes it difficult to enjo…

Nice game, but terribly frustrating. I spent hours figuring out the puzzles and the world is fascinating and well developed. It has good characterization and it's thought provoking. I was actually going to favorite this, but I changed my mind. Where my issue lies and what ultimately is causing me to rage quit and never even want to look at this again is in the ending. If you fail, not only do you have to restart the difficult endgame puzzles but you have to go all the way back to the day before that and redo the last boulder cave puzzle before you can retrigger the climax. Hours of time just freaking lost with nothing to show for it. They also throw some bizarre mirror light puzzle at you in the endgame that the game no prior experience with and no explanation. it appeared that I was supposed to use them to reflect on the switch, but I could move some of them, couldn't move others, couldn't figure out how to flip the mirrors and had only ten minutes. Since I still don't know what to do, I have no idea how to go about solving it, even if I replayed through the five puzzles that i would have to redo to get back to that point. I couldn't figure it out and I no longer want …

So this review is mostly informational because I’ve only played about two hours of the game so far and haven’t made it through the first run of the game yet. That being said, I’ve really enjoyed my time playing this game and I’d like to talk about a few of the game’s features here. First, I’ll start with the main feature, which is the story. I don’t want to give too much away, but basically the game’s description covers the major point: there is a beast terrorizing the village of Vidar and one person dies every night. Your actions in the game effect the outcome of the night. Whether this means there is a way to save the villagers from death or just change who dies I’m not sure, but it seems to me that the beast targets people in distress or grieving. The way to counteract this is to complete missions for the townsfolk and solve their problems. If you can solve their problems, you might keep them from dying. Again, I’m not sure. But that takes us to the second main feature of the game, which is the cave. Below Vidar, there is a cave which is where the beast is thought to keep it’s lair. Also, the cave is where you must go to solve the problems of the townsfolk, by retrieving items…

One of the few games that's worth replaying as it is quite different each time!