izigame.me

As a huge portal fan I quite liked this… even with it’s unfortunately (by me) experience-altering “defects” which I will talk about later, although it is by no means a bad game.

I love the setting and the world you’re thrown into, the way you’re introduced to everything is gradual and does a great job at immersing you into this weird situation and reality as you start learning bits and pieces of lore as you progress through the puzzles.

The characters' interactions add something special to the whole experience, not only raising questions or help giving an explanation but especially for the silly and humorous “casual” interactions that Astra and Aria have, they add a lot of life to the test chambers… and even if you are, you never truly feel alone.

The puzzles at the start of the game is where they really shine, the elements and mechanics involved in them are used in such creative ways that they actually make them fun to squeeze your brain through and solve them :3

The best aspect of the entire game in my opinion are the visuals… my GOSH they look amazing, everything’s incredibly detailed and realistic, the environments at the beginning of the game never feel too empty nor too crowded and you can really see how much care the developers and artists put into this… atleast at the beginning

Unfortunately it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, the game had a lot of immersion-breaking situations and awkwardness as i’m about to explain

Firstly there is the level design, at the later stages of the game everything suddenly starts feeling out of place and as if it’d been rushed… empty rooms and layouts that seemingly have no purpose but to be there for you to pass through and never look back to, areas that are seemingly really important and essential for the centre, parts i would imagine requiring lots of thought and planning for such a large scale facility just feel so empty and weird… with the only way to get to a place to another would be using jump platforms or too conveniently placed testing elements (as a direct example,
the whole reactor sequence and final escape to the entropy bay).

Now, I know that the whole centre is supposedly made out of puzzle areas and such as stated ingame, but to this extent it really threw me off, breaking any immersion that previously built up.
It brings a seemingly unserious atmosphere to a seriously depicted situation, completely breaking the immersion.

And then there’s the puzzles themselves… unfortunately they didn’t hold up as well as i imagined with the impression left from the first half of the game, they become redundant, solutions themselves start to become so unintuitive and mostly improvisation work more than actual designated puzzle solving, with different ways to cheat and break them, gets a bit frustrating… had to get through many of them aided by a walkthrough.

Storywise it follows the same line as the rest, would be just repeating myself if i said anything.

Another smaller gripe i have is with the “Collect all intel” achievement, very tedious. if you die in a certain level after accessing a terminal, the game doesn’t save your progress, forcing you to repeat the whole step of collect it, getting through the puzzle and saving… to make things worse there’s no real way to get back to a specific level after completing the game to find what you missed… only a chapter selection menu, which if you missed something at the very end of you’re forced to replay through the entirety of said chapter to collect it.
This is also the reason I'm not yet able to complete it… i’m missing two intels and upon watching a guide i can tell i collected all of them since i clearly remember reading them myself ingame… although due to probably died or left before i completed a level after collecting them leaving me with no other option but to probably replay the entire game just to collect what’s missing.

In short, it’s a really good game although seemingly rushed near the end, puzzles are fun and visuals are amazing for the first half of it, I’d recommend it only for that.