Lake Ridden

Oh boy.. where to start with this one.. Lake Ridden is a puzzle game in a walking sim. As for story, it's very basic and nothing is really explained. Seems more of a mixup of two completely irrelevant story lines. Graphics are dull. The first few area's are ok, but most of the game takes place in a very thick fog. Therefore, it's hard to see where you are going. On top of that, mouse movement is extremely erratic, making you do unexpected quick turns. This makes navigating even more confusing. Puzzles are a mixed bag as well. Some are pretty good, while most are copy-paste with little variation. Sadly enough, the in-story hints also contained red herrings. This turned some of the more logical puzzles into pure guesswork, at least for me. The best puzzle in the game was the graphics setup in the main menu. What the hell is going on over there? It just refused to remeber the frequency. And I had to enable 'resolution downscaling' to get rid of enormous fps drops.. on an RTX 3090.. for a six year old game with dated graphics... like what?? I was hoping the story would get more interesting and at least drag me along, but even that didn't happen. For puzzle die-hards, there are ce…

Finding this in my backlog, I thought I'd bash it out and see what happens. I started out looking forward to playing the game, but it didn't take long to feel bored and unimpressed. First off I'd have to say the visuals weren't as great as the screenshots on the store page make it out to be - overall it was pretty dull and seemed mostly to be shades of browns, greens and greys. There is a thing where you can light any lights you come across (as if by magic as some are just lying around in the grass) but I stopped doing this when even this simple action seemed pointless to me. In all truth though, I had no issues with the puzzles. Everything DOES make sense, despite what others might say. The only trouble I ended up cracking it over was puzzle box 9, but after looking up the answer it seems it can be done as well, haha. Well, I did 8/9 by myself so I'm kind of satisfied. I'll treat myself to a naughty food treat later. The problem with this game is its pacing. Boredom and falling asleep at your keyboard are your greatest enemies. Various reasons spring to mind: the puzzles are limited to only two or three different sorts (the nine puzzle boxes are all the same type of game); some…

It was fun when it wasn't frustrating. Good parts are, the whole atmosphere is well done, visuals, music, ambients set the mood nicely. But that's where good ends. The story makes no sense, neither during the play, nor when you finish it. It has three parts which mix worse than water and oil slapped together. Puzzles are more annoying than fun. There are four kinds of them. 1) Flip the rectangular board of different size from one state to another by clicking every cell which flips all adjacent ones. It's annoying because it's used repeatedly (10 times or so), most of them are HUGE (we're talking even 10x10 huge), and they flip SLOWLY. 2) Puzzles which rely on seemingly intentionally vague audio/visual clues (repeat a sequence of 10 notes of almost identical pitch which you could only figure out with a perfect ear or a spectrum analyzer on an audio capture, or a looped sequence of lines where you are not shown where the start is). 3) Puzzles which look so out of place you are just flabbergasted. 4) A handful of puzzles which fit the setting, but are still rather funky. And on top of that, you have to walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, between two furthest points on the ma…

Was an interesting game, but the puzzles sometimes felt unnecessary at times, would have been nice to see a bit more from this developer but they seem to have called it quits

Walking simulator with light puzzle elements. Graphics are decent. Atmosphere is well done. Story is also fine. Puzzles at times could a bit more fleshed out and the controls should be a bit more responsive. I did not enjoy it enough to recommend it but if you are into stuff like that. Go for it. Score: 5/9

Immersive, escapist, challenging and engaging,