Phoenix Springs

A game I purchased, sat on for a good several years like I've done with albums by my favorite musicians anticipating something with expectations that are too great, too afraid to open the box and become disappointed. It met them handedly.

Art is excellent. Has voice acting of thoughts of main character, although it’s not my favorite voice. The puzzles are annoying and not always making logical sense. It’s more guess and check if you’re right too often. It wastes your time. I like the vibe, but I’ll just watch a walkthrough instead.

beautiful. a barely-lucid dream. difficult to explain and impossible to spoil. found myself crying and can't articulate why. an aside, but it's fascinating how the same games/pieces/""content""/etc gets fed to the same audience via the same monopolized digital storefront so you get complaints of "ambiguity" and the dreaded "artsy" by people who wouldn't last a day in the rain

I can't speak much to the gameplay, as I'm not normally a fan of point and click. I came to this game as a tourist, guide in hand throughout, but taking the time when it piqued my curiosity to dig in further. What I found was a short story well worth a few hours of my afternoon, ever bit as beautiful, moody, meditative, and sometimes disturbing as the trailer had promised. Even following a guide, I'm glad I purchased this and took the reigns myself, rather than looking for a playthrough of the game online. If you feel drawn to Phoenix Springs, make the journey.

This is a strange game with an otherworldly atmosphere and quiet intensity. It's barely constrained below the surface, but shines through in some well picked moments. The gameplay system is interesting, where you learn keywords and talk to people about them and use them on inert items in your environment. It's not as far off from the usual point-and-click experience as some might think, but it's not bad. The game can be a bit obtuse with the solutions sometimes, but for most of the time you have a vague direction of where to look. The selling point here is the atmosphere and artwork, however. I saw someone calling it Lynchian, and this is somewhat accurate if we're talking purposefully disjointed (positive) narratives like Lost Highway, rather than Twin Peaks. I definitely came away from it feeling like I'd had a full experience.

Exceptionally well presented with a print block aesthetic, Phoenix Springs at times feels like a parody pastiche of the point and click genre. With a surreal story told through dreamlike snippets, it might not be entirely clear what's going on, but it remains endlessly interesting and enviably bold.