Once Glorious Artahk

The game looks well-made and I'm sure it will find its audience, but I'm not one of them. You have to navigate a (seemingly pretty substantial) maze with no map. While being zoomed in to much, as somebody else called it. Navigating a large area while looking through a keyhole will never be something I enjoy. Nor will I ever enjoy having to do game-related things (like quest tracking or maps) outside of the game. I've done it before, back in the 90s, and I do not miss it at all. Also the lore you unlock, while well-written, is kinda hard to read because of the pixellated font. Presenting lengthy texts in this kind of font is just not good practice. Rating: ★★★☆☆

Once Glorious Artahk is an excellent puzzle/exploration game with knowledge-based unlocks. This is a note-taking type game! If you like this genre, it's absolutely worth your time. Now, if you're interested in more specifics: The writing is very good, which is important since reading notes is a significant part of the game. The game does a great job of setting up a world and story that leaves you curious to keep learning more, motivating the puzzle solving and exploration. The puzzles themselves are quite varied, with a few staple mechanics (such as the classic laser reflection (with twists, of course)), but the majority of puzzle mechanics are unique. Most of the time the puzzle is figuring out what the environment is trying to communicate, which is done well, and makes for many satisfying 'ah-ha' moments. As for exploration, it is enjoyable to walk the world and discover new things - but you have to expect to be lost alone in the deep dark woods for quite a while before you get a sense for things. Backtracking can be a little tedious at times, but it never got bad enough to really frustrate me. Oh yeah also the soundtrack and the art are both solid, very fitting to the atmosphere! Lastly, for the overarching stuff, the story, world, progression, all that - Excellent. Really, really good. Some of this stuff reminds me of how it felt playing Tunic and Outer Wilds, which is a big compliment. Bismuth Tales, thank you for making an awesome game in my favorite niche genre!

Surprisingly deep and engaging game that has a lot more content than you might expect. If you enjoyed figuring out the secrets in Animal Well you’ll probably enjoy this, as it draws a lot of inspiration from there. Some of the puzzles are very in depth, and almost all of them felt very intuitive to solve - just challenging enough to require some critical thinking, but not so hard as to be frustrating. I turned the beast off end ended up ignoring the lore entries because I wasn’t finding them to be very interesting but it didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the game. The other area for improvement is that some of the areas (especially royal parterre) require you to redo the same puzzles over and over to switch between traversal paths, which ended up being a little tedious. Aside from those things I really did enjoy this though and would highly recommend this for anyone who likes deep puzzle games.

A surprisingly big game, with plenty of puzzles to solve and deep lore to uncover. If you're interested but unsure, consider checking out the prologue stories in this game's events and announcements section (you'll have to scroll down to before the first 1.0.1 hotfix), and see if the writing interests you, as you'll be doing a lot of reading throughout the game. Some of my only criticisms of this game: - The default keybinds are a bit wonky, especially if you have experience with other 2D puzzle games. I'd recommend rebinding the controls before starting. - For long periods of playtime, the game is very open and directionless, sometimes to a fault. You'll usually have plenty of puzzles to solve, but if you miss the puzzle/location for the next major unlock, you'll probably have to scour the areas (or the lore entries) more thoroughly to find that puzzle. - In Outer Wilds fashion, some progression points are locked behind identifying key elements in the lore entries. However, they are not always very well telegraphed: relatively early on, a puzzle in one zone requires reading an entry that's unlocked in another zone, which points to a hidden area in a third zone. Depending on the sequence in which you find these three components, you might not make the link these three things are actually connected. - Relatedly, this game's lore entries have mostly no visual flair, so it's not always clear whether a lore entry is relevant to your progression, or if it really is just lore. Compare to Outer Wilds, where key elements are highlighted in orange, and the ship's log directly shows how bits of information you've picked up fit into the bigger picture. Despite all that, I do recommend giving this game a try if you enjoyed games like Outer Wilds and Blue Prince. It's really a great game, especially for a solo dev.

A very interesting metroidbrainia! Also, the lore and the atmosphere are very captivating dark fantasy.

It starts a little slow but I had a lot of fun playing it. The story writing was very enjoyable and I truly hate that nasty emerald eyed trixter.

I want to love this game but it can be so frustrating I'm not sure I want to continue. 😭 Mostly I really dislike the light orb timed puzzles. I just want to read the rest of the very good journal entries and story, but I don't have the willpower to attempt the puzzle again after 30 mins of failure so I'm throwing in the towel. I'm still going to recommend the game cause this is a me problem and the story is so good, I'm going to be wondering about that fox for a long time. 🥲