Aethernaut

Interesting game, but has some technical issues. Functions on Steamdeck, but Unity impacts performance heavily. Takes a long time to boot every time. Menu controls are buggy, sometimes moving down several options when you expect to move once, or changing the option again before moving off of it. In game, I think I averaged around 40 FPS, depending on where I was. Very few graphics options to change. Camera control is juttery and doesn’t allow precision. The game is clearly a “narrated by the developer” game, although maybe you can argue that it fits the character. The story is interesting though. The puzzle elements are very interesting, although it might be a little unintuitive until you understand it. I got stuck in an early room where a cube was imprisoned for its crimes, until I looked up the solution and figured out that purple is more powerful than blue, and proximity is important. After that, I liked solving all the puzzles up to where things open up more. After that, I followed a pathway to a new section where there are two puzzles bolted onto each other, and a new green puzzle element. Unfortunately, I restarted in the second puzzle, and the door behind me closed. I eit…

Very much inspired by talos principle with a touch of lightmatter and a sprinkling of portal, classic first person puzzle approach. If you love those games, you'll at least like this. Be wary, it's janky. Performance is bad on good hardware, especially with the portal mechanic active. Graphics are...decently styled, but feel very 1999, and a lot of graphical bugs like one-sided textures and z-fighting. There's voice acting. It's not great, but the bar has dropped on that recently with a lot of bad voicing coming out, so I would've been more annoyed in 2022 than I am now. The time-portal mechanic kinda sucks, every game that has tried that type of mechanic (including my beloved talos principle 1) has failed at it, it's best avoided. The other mechanics are good. I like the combination of TP-style gear with LM-style beam width control. Some puzzles have unused gear, implying multiple solutions are possible. So, yeah, it's got a lot of problems, but a lot of good too. You'll get your $17 worth of entertainment if you like puzzly games.

Delete the voice acting bit, then maybe I would try it again.

[quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/9686972/]Follow "[b]First Person Exploration and Puzzle Games[/b]" for more games like this![/url][/quote] Another Portal-adjacent first person puzzlers where you put boxes on buttons. I only played about an hour of this, but the puzzles were very clever, with lots of "aha!" moments. That's the most important thing for a puzzle game, and is the reason I'm giving this a thumbs up. However, nearly everything else about the game is mediocre-to-bad. They tried to do the "Portal narrator" thing that a lot of other similar puzzle games have done, and did not do it well. The performance of this game is absolutely abysmal - I have frame stutters even with a 5080. The game does not look great (with the Unity lighting engine doing all of the heavy lifting in the screenshots). The story and writing seem amateurish. The voice acting is not great. The game is pretty buggy. Still, despite all that, I'd recommend this game to anyone looking for some clever puzzles, as long you've played all the better ones. This one supposedly gets tedious after about 7 hours, but I won't be getting that far.

Excessively mid, way too much talking, garbage world building, disjointed story telling. the puzzles are fine but have too little testing and its way too easy to softlock. many puzzles can be bugged to solve. dont make another game without getting more testers

This was one of those games that was very hard to decide if I would recommend or not. The core gameplay of solving puzzles was very well done, and had some impressive ideas with the challenge increasing over time. However, towards the end game, I found myself hitting the "Complete Puzzle" button quite often because the combination of time travel plus teleportation plus alternative dimensions was way over my head, and I also found the length of the game dragging on. Note that not all puzzles need to be completed in order to finish the game. I was simply stubborn and wanted to collect every puzzle, so I can blame myself a bit for making it drag on. The story was interesting although it's delivery could use some help. I do appreciate the immense amount of voice acting that was included, even if it wasn't the best. The graphics aren't fantastic but what bothered me more was the copy paste of random assets just to fill each room. It made the areas seem cluttered and I honestly would have preferred if the rooms were clean and open. They just didn't add to the atmosphere for me. I ran into a few bugs (which was mostly me jumping out of bounds and breaking puzzles) but nothing game brea…