Review SuperFieroStatus 3/5 · Aug 27, 2015
Play "The Talos Principle" Instead
(Played on Xbox One) Pneuma: The Breath of Life is a first person puzzle game. It's alright. Extremely short and simple, the game explores some basic Philosophy 101 level thinking in its narrative while throwing puzzles at you that involve you looking at things. I mean that. While there is a “use” button, it's barely used. Very few puzzles require …
(Played on Xbox One) Pneuma: The Breath of Life is a first person puzzle game. It's alright. Extremely short and simple, the game explores some basic Philosophy 101 level thinking in its narrative while throwing puzzles at you that involve you looking at things. I mean that. While there is a “use” button, it's barely used. Very few puzzles require you to use things, and the majority of the game has you looking at triggers and moving to trigger them. For example, a bridge stands before you with a glowing blue eye on it. The bridge is perpendicular to your path, making crossing impossible. When you look at the eye on the bridge and strafe right, the bridge rotated right. You must look at the eye and move right until the bridge is parallel to you, and then cross without looking at the eye again, should you accidentally rotate the path again.
It's a system that doesn't work well and feels clunky. Also, the quality of the puzzles are substandard. Reading Geoff Keighley's “The Final Hours of Portal 2” (and, I'm sorry to have to do this, but Portal 2 is kind of the gold standard on modern first person puzzlers) it's clear that the Valve team put emphasis on what they called “the aha! Moment.” This represents you finally solving a difficult puzzle, and feeling rewarded mentally. You feel smart, everything “clicks,” and you can proceed. Pneuma has no aha moments. It's either toddler-easy or extremely frustrating. There were only two puzzles in the short game that I was stuck on, and the solutions ranged from “what?” to “I didn't know I had to do that.” No aha moments, here. If you've taken a college level philosophy course (or spent a night as a teenager staring at a ceiling) you'll most likely be met with old ideas. Questions of God and consciousness and reality all touched upon here, but never explored. It got a little tiresome.
Pneuma is OK, but will feel like a ripoff to many. If you're dying for a first person puzzler with heavy philosophy, I suggest “The Talos Principle.” While significantly longer and seriously difficult to actually complete, Talos is more worth your time both as a game and a philosophical lesson.