Relicta (2020)

Played a few levels and overall it feels unremarkable. Not that that's all bad. The puzzles seem interesting enough, although I've just had finished with what felt like the tutorial levels before going to bed early due to an annoying cold. I'm hopeful that they will develop in interesting ways.

What most concerns me, though, is the amount of dialogue and cutscenes. The quality of the dialogue is on par with the terrible voice acting, and there's just too much of it. Hey, devs, I'm not here for the generic story, I'm here for the puzzles. So you don't need to try so hard. Less is more.

I've played very little of this game but i already have an opinion, i'll edit later if i change my mind. Starting with the cons because there are a lot.

• I'm not fond of the sound so far: labs have a datacenter sound for some reason, the facility's AI that you talk to all the time sounds like it's in your head, answer timings feel wrong during conversations, the sound effect that the gloves make could have been better and there are no footstep sounds.
• Too much random unnecesary swearing, wich wouldn't be a bad thing if this were some kind of detective or crime game, but the characters are scientists in the moon and they have a heavy indian accent so it's really weird.
• Music is unremarkable, and overly dramaric at times.
• Gameplay doesn't feel original, putting cubes on big buttons on the floor is portal's trademark, instead of getting a physics defying gun you get physics defying gloves, it's just not different enough.
• There's a permanent dirty-lens effect wich i find annoying, i wondered if it was because my character is wearing a space helmet so i tried looking in a reflective surface to see my character, looked at some glass in a door and, surprise surprise, the "reflection" is just a blurred photograph of a random common house, i opened the door and there was nothing similar behind it.
• The labs design feels like a child's idea of what a lab looks like, they tossed a couple of flasks filled with neon colored liquids and a microscope and that's it.
• The pause menu is as basic as it gets, reminiscent of a flash game.
• The story's excuse for why you have to solve puzzles is the worst i've heard so far.

Pros:

• Graphics are nice, if you ignore the reflections.
• Yeah, that's it

Can't comment about the story or the puzzle's quality yet because i haven't played enough for that. I'm reconsidering if i want to finish this game, but since i have a weak spot for puzzle platformers i probably will. This weak spot for the genre is also the sole reason for me to give it 3 stars instead of two.