Qasir al-Wasat: International Edition

Solid, enjoyable puzzles. Simple stealth mechanics. Beautiful aesthetic. If you like demonology, djinn, and alchemy type stuff, and the style in the screenshots appeals to you (and if you, unlike some of the people leaving reviews, have the foresight required to look at the "How to Play" screen in the menu before playing), then it's a solid use of 5 dollars and 6-7 hours.

Quasir-Al-Wasat is hidden little gem to which i return again and again to never finish. This games is exceptional in many aspects. Visual aestetics, arabic culture, mystery...its just great. Game lore is somewhat stingy and mostly featured by various hints, but still interesting and keep you hooked. Its like onion - have multiple layers and more you go then story gets filled with mystery. Visually games pretty simple, even somewhat "dull", but very unique, made in style if Arabic miniatures Overall game design have strong resemblanse with dungeons in Zelda, rooms, enemies, traps, BUT with stealth element Problem, however, that its quite hard and closer to end it gets unforgivinly hard. Being smart but weak creature you dont have any "healthbar", one hit and you lose. You can repeat, ofc, its even in lore, buut checkpoints is scarce. Another problem is puzzles itself. They too progressively gets hard and start require pretty also quick reflexes to complete. Its somewhat get annoying especially with rhytm based traps. I honestly never managed to finish it, just stuck again and again, until rragequit, but overall feelings is rather good. Yes, developers went overboard wuth traps …

Timers. For 3 hours, and because the mystery is engaging, I endured the terrible controls that are unfit for stealth, the gormless corporate checkpoints that are unfit for a PC save system, the italicised semi-cursive typeface that is unfit for comfortable reading... I won't be enduring timed races with these same lousy controls. Especially not when death (by traps) closes gates that were opened earlier and that are not timer-dependent. Seriously, not only do the controls ignore traditional schemes, for example with Sneak mapped to a trigger, the latter requires a permanent trigger press (no toggle; way to kill a gamepad,) it confusingly acts like a zoom out when figuring out empirically what buttons do (the 'help' is incorrect,) you lacerate air like a buffoon when you want to open a door (because both actions use the same key; meanwhile most keys remain unused,) you get stuck when walking along walls, and a basic doorstep crossing is tedious more often than not. Then you must distract/attract guards. Without tools. Not breaking anything. Only by walking overtly for a fraction of a second at the right distance. Have fun with that. If detected, you die, redo everything between h…

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Awesome game, I enjoyed it a lot. It's like those stealth sessions of the good old Al-Qadim. I loved how you started unlocking the map in a metrovania style, loved the story and different endings, some parts were a bit hard or annoying but overall the game and the story were a lot of fun!

Thoroughly enjoyed this game. The stealth and puzzle mechanics are well thought-out and engaging, but the main draw for me was the story and the whole atmosphere. This game is a small masterpiece with all the dedicated artworks, bits of lore, painted backgrounds, poems and the arabic typographic glyphs everywhere. I've never played a game like this one. You can see a lot of love went into it. Yes the gameplay can feel a bit "dated" or janky at points, but if you look past that and can get into the atmosphere I'm sure you'll enjoy it. The game has a few endings and is generally worth exploring through the numerous achievements created by the devs. Basically the only thing that really annoyed me in this game was [spoiler]the blood gate (🩸🩸🩸) bug. I really wish they'd fix that. It's not a deal breaker though, as (luckily) it's an extra area, and you can get basically every achievement even with this bug. It is annoying though and makes progression more difficult, as you cannot make use of the shortcut it provides.[/spoiler] So it's not a big thing, just annoying. Other than that great game that you can sit down to for 30 mins, an hour, or however long you like. It doesn't oversti…