izigame.me

It was really hard to give this a thumbs down, and if you played 1 & 2, you probably should play 3 as well, even if it has a lot of problems going for it. I appreciate the strong story-driven narrative of the game, but it has quite a few large questionmarks left unanswered, and also weird and frustrating puzzle design directions.
The story: SPOILER It picks up at where the 2nd game ended. The structure of the story completely falls apart. 1)We do not know who the mysterious Order member is, unaffected by time freeze. He is just left completely forgotten. 2) I still dont understand how time travel works in this universe, but it is not very well thought out, and not explained at all by the end. Our actions in the past have virtually zero consequences in the present, be it modifying items, or putting out fires. The time travel completely ignores the butterfly effect, or any consequence, save for the whole destroying the time machine thing undoing everything. 3) If the Order can use time travel, how couldnt they see the Pope's takeover coming? 4) Can we just talk about the fact that, according to the games logic, we destroyed the time machine before anyone could use it. That means our protag is left to rot in prison to die lmfao. What an unsatisfying way to end the series, but I guess you could chalk it up to self-sacrifice, the devs didnt show it though. It is obvious that by the end, they ran out of time and/or money to properly finish the game and wrap up the story. The temple section could have been a grand, epic, final puzzle, but it was reduced to a match-outfit game... which leads to
The puzzles. Extremely hit or miss. Some were genuinely interesting and well-designed, some were extremely frustrating. You virtually never use your notebook to solve puzzles (they more like act as a story recap/reminder if you stop playing for a while and need to catch up). But it is absolutely necessary to solve the last puzzle. Why? Why at the very end did you have to do this? Some items are hidden in dark corners among other uninteractable objects, leaving you stuck. Many puzzles are not logically consistent, one time they follow a learning curve pattern, sometimes they completely break them and throw previous rules out in the trash. Sometimes I was overthinking, sometimes I was thinking by completely different rules, leaving me frustrated quite a few times. This game could have benefited a lot from free-roam rather than point and click movement.
Sadly, this game did not wrap up the series well... but still, if you enjoyed the previous 2, play it I guess? I myself left with a bad taste in my mouth but you might have a different experience.