izigame.me

I really wish there was a "mixed" option for reviews. Get it when it's on sale, and it's a cute little game with some good moments, if you can bear its very glaring flaws.
"Seen" is a very short runner/puzzle hybrid set in a dystopian world with a very simplistic aesthetic. I am obligated to parrot the other reviews by likening it to "Inside," a game I admittedly haven't played just yet. The visual design is fantastic, and the pacing is reasonable for a game of its scope and price. The runner levels are a mixed bag, but the main story is nothing that takes more than a couple tries to accomplish. The difficulty of the puzzle levels is satisfactory; I cannot gauge whether there are actual difficulties in the puzzles, or if I am simply really bad at the sort of puzzles in this kind of game. The story is clearly designed to take center stage, and it lands quite well when it matters. The music essentially carries the game and does a fantastic job maintaining the atmosphere.
All that said, there are four unavoidable flaws which can diminish the experience if you aren't prepared for them. The first one thankfully has a remedy: I would recommend disabling achievement notifications on your first play-through. The achievements in the game are letters you can use to spell funny words on your profile (this might be its own motivation to play the game), but the way they are acquired is by collecting the main collectibles in the game, meaning that you will regularly be inundated with many, MANY achievements all through the experience of playing the story. This on its own will often break the immersion. The second issue is one which sadly cannot be fixed: the game contains text, and it's BAD. The game is absolutely smothered by the inspirational quotes plastered nearly everywhere, and they are very aggressively the r/im14andthisisdeep kind of quotes. Even the "blue = hope" and "red = discouragement" in the tutorial is already shoving the developer's specific reading of their own visual storytelling against the player's face.
The third issue is that sometimes the world feels more goofy than sad; every interaction you have with other people in the game is hostile towards you, and they are often comically violent and sadistic towards you. Sometimes this hits, but when it doesn't it just feels utterly ridiculous and breaks immersion. This ties into a neglected mechanic: you cover your ears to avoid harsh noises from radios and the foul mouths of other people, but this comes with no punishment other than reducing your field of view. In fact, this reduction of field of view is too small to heavily impact runner levels while providing a great deal of assistance in parkour during the puzzle sections. Perhaps this is a fair choice for the devs, but it feels a little off for this mechanic not to have some kind of cost to its overuse.
The final issue is perhaps the one which is the worst: the controls just aren't good. They do a good enough job to get you through the game, but they are uncomfortable even at their best, and the way that you'd expect them to work isn't how they actually work. This is especially the case when you jump, since that's the clunkiest of all the actions. The moment you let go of the jump button you start falling straight to the ground, which isn't a bad choice but does create a steep learning curve if you're used to platforming in other games. On its own it would be fine, if the controls weren't also sluggish and imprecise, compounding with the difficulty of the challenge levels to produce moments where multiple frame-perfect inputs are necessary to clear some challenges. It's in spite of these awful controls that I managed to get through even the main story, given that this game definitely isn't the genre I typically play.
The game is often on sale, often for less than a dollar like when I got it, so for its price it's not at all the worst you could get with your money, but it also isn't quite the best. It's flawed, but just artistic enough that I think it deserves an honest try.