The Spectrum Retreat (2018)

A puzzle game with a slightly confusing narrative and great atmosphere.

The Good The intro, and the atmosphere in game is great. Even the relaxing feel during puzzles is nice. The butler robots were so great, made the big empty hotel feel very eerie I loved it. The first half of the game was solid 4 star for me.

The Bad I loved the in-between puzzles part of the game so much that I really ended up hating the floor puzzles. I loved finding the clues to get to the puzzles. But, after the first set, every floor was harder and took so much longer to get to the next in between puzzle area. I wanted so badly to explore more of the hotel and interact with the robot staff. Alas as the puzzles got harder and longer the parts I liked got even shorter. There was even a point when walking to get to another room in the hotel to look for clues it would like, zap you closer to where you needed to be so even walking through the hotel was shortened. I'm sure some might like that, but I didn't. The narrative is okay, there was a twist at the end that I didn't see coming but overall the story was sort of hard to follow, or I just didn't care once it swayed from what the Hotel was.

The Ugly I couldn't play through it back to back, the puzzles like I said got a little tedious and overwhelming in some places, solving them felt great, but eventually, on the last two floors I looked up most of it just because I wanted to see where the story progressed. To me the ending wasn't worth it, I probably would have been almost upset if I had to figure out the puzzles myself and had an ending like that. I had to keep coming back to this game bc the puzzles tired me.

Conclusion The first half, when the puzzles were easier and there was more hotel interaction/exploration, I enjoyed a lot. The last half was eh. This is a puzzle game first and foremost. Some say it's a portal like and I agree. The story wasn't bad, it was interesting. but the most interesting part wasn't the point of the story. So... yeah. 3.5 bumped down to 3.

This game helped me realise two things.

1. One of the characteristics of a good puzzle game is that, no matter what you do, you should not get to an unsolvable state that forces you to restart everything from ground zero. That doesn't mean no failstates like dying.

2. Games should be content with offering a short but dense experience instead of padding the sh*t out of the gametime to justify the asking price.

Chances are you could be playing something better

From what I played before quiting most of the game does not infact take place in the ritzy looking hotel that was in the screen shots but in "authentication points". These are nondescript rooms of uninteresting grey walls, accessed from the hotel, where you solve puzzles that involve changing the color of various cubes to open up gates. These puzzles have nothing to do with the game's narration, setting, or various characters. The story is told in brief moments between traveling to different "authentication points" and in brief flashbacks that consist of only of voice overs. These authentication points occupy the majority of the game's time and for something that describes itself as 'narration driven' you'd think the puzzles would involve actually interacting with characters or parts of the hotel, rather than a bunch of cubes and only occasionally having some of the story revealed in a brief little flashback. And while I did not get far enough to have much the story revealed it felt like it was feeling pretty cliched.

The puzzles themselves quickly wore on me. I didn't like having to tedious go and back and forth across the room getting multiple instances of 'green' to slap on the white cubes on the other end of the hallway; the puzzles were filled with too many these really brainless micro-steps which felt more like a way to pad it out than to challenge the player. Puzzles also feel repetitive because the game doesn't introduce new mechanics or twists to the puzzle often, so it felt like the last 5 puzzles I solved before I quit were just variations on the same thing.