The Story Is You - Look Within

Alright. [i]The Story Is You - Look Within[/i] is done and dusted, inasmuch as I read all the panels, went through all the room of the castle, and then floated off into oblivion. All of that took me right at five minutes. So, your necessary investment of time is minimal with this free to play title. You could of course spend more time contemplating the various panels, and at that point, your investment of time will be all about how much time you wish to spend doing so. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3329357230 Ultimately, this is a digital self-help book, exploring via quick quotes and philosophical musings, how you can go about feeling good about yourself and generally being the best version of yourself possible. Me personally, I've always been happy with who I am and have a good awareness of who other people are, so this is less topical for me, but was interesting, nonetheless. And you may very well find the messaging in the game to be relevant to your life. In which case, this game hopes to have a positive impact on your perception and where you are in life. The gameplay is kind of like having the developer tools at your disposal, inasmuch as the came…

[quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/9686972/]Follow "[b]First Person Exploration and Puzzle Games[/b]" for more games like this![/url][/quote] You noclip around a castle (not a joke) looking at floating stock images (not a joke) containing pseudo-intellectual self-help quips. It takes about 3 minutes to see everything. I had to wait in-game an extra two minutes so I could write this review. There's not even an options screen - when you hit escape, the game just closes. You can safely avoid this one.

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I'm a fast reader a trait i picked up from childhood. So this experience lasted around 10 minutes for me. This could have been a lot more subtle and the use of inserted images to get across messages felt like the developer half assed it. Could have had monks of wisdom with the old building that passes knowledge onto you as you go from monk to monk or maybe statue to statue. Unfortunately someone has covered what i was initially going to say in another review: "it's free. The artwork is beautiful. It's empty. Throughout the scenery are various motivational posters full of trite tautologies and vain platitudes. Some are even contradictory. I suppose that if you were looking for something to inspire you, maybe this would work, but so would reading a book." Its a shame because with a little bit of thought this could have been a really deep thinker of a game and instead it looks like a well done set of assets with some "live laugh love" "money is the root of all evil" preachy sounding imaged quotes ham-fisted into it. I wanted to get lost in this world and have this artwork hold up a mirror to me but it feels like they missed the mark of what this should have been.

I'm not going to post a negative review as to not harm the integrity of the project. It's a fair attempt at trying something insightful and provocative, as per experience, the attempt falls flat at the lack of subtlety. The game could be far more interesting if the player was a real entity inside the map. But so far you don't even explore the environment, you just spectate a stock asset in the unity engine with uncompressed PNGs with either ambiguous or weirdly specific text written on them. The message lacks metaphor, and therefore the story is not up to you; if no interpretation can be built from the environment, then it's just a museum of inspirational quotes. As a side note, the performance is horrendous, for a project that has little to offer, it's poorly optimized and shows the lack of effort put into it. My final veredict, contrary to the text above, is possitive. Since it works as inspiration for a more complex and detailed project that could help this example as a template for a environmental narrative. If there's a way of making a walking simulator in a meaningful way, this could be barebones what it would look like in it's bare essentials.

A genre defining game about a disembodied soul who decides that yeeting itself into the cosmos is preferable to enduring humanity after gazing upon the best that our kind has to offer.