L'Île Archéo

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the camera is too close, can't zoom out to see more of the surroundings and where to go. incredibly annoying gibberish during dialog, coupled with the mandatory and just as annoying typewriter effect. what's worse, have to hold lmb to make text appear slightly faster, can't even click to show the whole thing at once. each sentence and every unskippable dialog is a pain to get through, so I simply gave up after about 10 minutes and it's supposed to only take about half an hour. controls aren't rebindable and only wasd (and the mouse) works for movement, arrows don't. a single volume slider instead of separate ones for music, sfx and speech. no resolution options or any gfx settings, that slider and 2 languages are the only adjustable things. esc doesn't do anything (bring up and close the pause menu, go back a screen, etc.). wasn't even surprised to find out a bunch of artists made it with a single programmer (also an artist). not that a solo developer, artistic or otherwise, can't be capable of doing the absolute minimum, but neither that person nor the 3(!) 'designers' bothered with basic functionality. no sprinting but movement speed is decent and it says it saves when you quit…

Nice school project with great art and surprisingly good physics. Mechanics are varied (lifts, drill, lights, cleanup, instructions...) and all work very well. The students are talented. The teachers, not so much, as they promote illiteracy and neurons jellification by use of the typewriter effect. Needless to say, reading is extremely annoying and the storytelling suffers. Nevertheless, everything else is pleasant to manipulate. Short, albeit longer than a simple proof of concept, it provides a good hour of relaxation with post-apocalyptic archaeology.

"L'Île Archéo" is a student project from Quebec. This student project has you running around a low poly/cartoony 3D rendered environment and doing some archaeology themed mini-puzzles. Okay, I guess? The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 c…

Overall it is a good little game, especially for being a free one. Visuals are cute and gameplay is pleasant. Playing it, I had a feeling it is not a product, but more like some personal project. Though, I wasn't sure, as pretty much everything shown is really well done, as if it was aspiring to be a full game for a price of 10-20 eur. Quality of it is high and doesn't feel like alpha or beta. There are no real gameplay issues, no bugs, no sound problems. It is just very short. Looking at the description now, I see yes, it is a student project! And now I'm even impressed with the quality for a student project. There are certain things that could be much better as a feedback. - The flashlight is completely useless. - The story is so much focused on ecology that it feels like preaching rather than a dialog or communication with the player. Telling it through future animals discovering human leftovers is a good idea and has attempts in funny moments like misunderstandings of purpose, but the potential is not explored and stops at being so preachy about environment. - The restoring artifacts is too simple and has no way to fail. It makes it less of an experience and more of a ch…

Very cute short game, with lots of secrets. I couldn't find the last one tho :\