Once Glorious Artahk

This is a *wonderful*, 9/10 game for me. This game nails the atmosphere, making it feel like you're an archaeologist who is trying to decipher the mystery of the city of Artahk. The music is gorgeous, the writing is superb, and I was enraptured for the 20-some hours it took me to beat the game. No game is for everybody, but this game is more "not for everybody" than most, so lets go over the things that might prevent you from enjoying this game, to see if it is for you. 1 - There is no combat, only exploration, story, and puzzle-solving. 2 - This game will not hold your hand. There are no immersion-breaking tutorials. It believes in you, and your ability to decipher the puzzles in front of you, possibly more than you believe in yourself. I had to look up an answer once, but the clues were all there in front of me, I had just completely misinterpreted what they meant. 3 - You will need to be observant and take notes. Screenshots were sufficient for me, but having a small notebook in front of me would have been useful. 4 - There is a lot of reading. You are discovering the lore of the city of Artahk, and this lore is presented as wonderful, well-written stories which you unl…

Absolutely phenomenal experience. Extremely satisfying to uncover the story, and solve puzzles at your own pace. So many "Oh but that means..." moments. I wish I could play it for the first time once again.

It starts a little slow but I had a lot of fun playing it. The story writing was very enjoyable and I truly hate that nasty emerald eyed trixter.

A great exploration-based puzzle game. I've heard it called a Metroidbraina, and while I don't quite agree, it was a wonderful experience still. I also saw that the dev added multiple options to the game to help various player complaints, which is a great touch. Good dev, good work. For a game like this, the worldbuilding was surprisingly interesting, I really liked the tales, the mysteries and the evocative way various concepts (such as the garden, or "white") were conjured in the imagination. I loved the experience, despite a few things I really didn't like. One was the beast. I understand the vision, but if, say, Talos Principle randomly killed you if you stayed on a puzzle too long, I'd hate it. Thankfully, the dev added an option to turn it off which I ended up using. The other thing I didn't like were the timing puzzles - the controls of "magenta" kept tripping me up, and I had to redo some of them way too many times, just because I found the input too difficult and the timing too tight (for two, I had to look up guides - I was doing the right idea, but my execution was lacking). Despite these, I still loved the experience to fully complete the game until every last …

Fun game.

Fun, engaging enough to complete, and not too overwhelming re: linking together disparate clues for a exploration-puzzle game like this.