SOMNIFUGE

Somnifuge is a solid puzzle-box horror game, one that takes after survival horror puzzle design, but leaves behind the combat. It doesn't do anything in particular especially well, but I think broadly speaking it does well at each thing it sets out to do. There is a story here, but it's one that you are left to piece together yourself. [spoiler]From what I can gather, there are a few key pieces of information. For one, your entire game takes place in a simulation. The entire process of playing the game is, seemingly, trying your very damndest to get out of that simulation and being stopped by a vague overarching threat. This threat is two-fold, there being a sort of doctor character that seems to be (I'm really unsure about this) trying to stop you, and then a more obscure threat that is in cahoots with said doctor character (this being most clear from the ending where the both of them are sat together in the form of the final boss). There's also a lady who appears near the end that may also be a distinct character, but I am not quite certain about this. For two, in the real world, there's this mysterious "gossamer signal" out in space (particularly in orbit around Jupiter, as la…

Not a bad horror puzller per se but did I enjoy it? Mostly not. The reasons for that are the often too confusing puzzles (the lightbeam puzzle near the end is so annoying) and that this game is often maze after maze. Good luck beating the game without a guide. Then if you die you often have to replay huge sections of the game again which is so frustrating. The ckeckpoints are so far away and therefore bad. And yes, you also sometimes have enemies in the mazes, very "fun". And overall the game is just too long, it just doesn't want to end. You also have to backtrack a lot. Then the game basically has no real story. The big upside of the game is the creativity it shows. But that alone is not enough for me.

hidden gem

Good! You start off exploring a spooky house with locked doors and you need solve some puzzles to unlock doors. As you unlock more doors (or expose previously-hidden paths) by solving puzzles and you explore more, you can trivially unlock doors that provide shortcuts within the house. However, the whole house is a bit hard to map in your head and there is no in-game map, so it can be a bit frustrating getting from where you are to where you want to go. Along the way there are a variety of puzzles, of some mixed quality. Most were pretty fair and interesting, although I needed to use the in-game hints a couple of times. After the house section which you can say is the first and largest act of the game, the next few acts become decidedly more weird - but mostly in a good way. Those sections also contained some good, although generally easier, puzzles. The game has a total about four or five "acts", depending on how you (or I) want to count, that each have very different flavor from one another. There is final act, which I did not enjoy - an arcade section where you essentially are flying forward (in first person view) at a fixed speed where you have to dodge stuff. If you colli…

What a hidden gem of a game. I love the atmosphere, aesthetic, and puzzles. Really felt like I was playing five games in one towards the end, and even though I'm still somewhat confused by the story, that doesn't bother me at all! This game makes me never went to use a stairwell ever again (iykyk) 8.5/10

this cam out on my birthday! honestly such a treat to stumble onto such a neat and rewarding game