The Land Of Lamia

Just finished this little game, only took about an hour (though it took 4 hrs to get all the cards xD). The concepts are there, and the developer sounds like he has the right idea for making the game, but it feels unfinished. The developer has said he plans on finishing it if he can get the time and/or funds, but at this point it’s more of a demo than a full game. I still enjoyed it and the puzzles were satisfying, I’d say give it a shot if you can get it on sale.

Creative but let down by awful camera angles, terrible controls and finicky puzzles. The characters, Thomas and Lily, weird me out quite a bit but I genuinely like the setting, mystery and art style in the book pages. It's a shame the game was never fully finished. There are only three chapters with gameplay (a maze, matching game and jumping puzzle) which take approximately one hour. I got very frustrated trying to line up the characters, there's only one control to move both of them and they move at different paces so you're constantly juggling and playing catch up.

Controls are brutal to master, the learning curve is incredibly high to figure out just how to control the characters. You control BOTH characters at the same time and one moves faster then the other. This is really tedious considering that you are trying to manipulate them down a narrow and twisting path and one continuously moves off the path.

Okay so there is a maze in this game where you are a kid with a blue backwards hat. You seem to be guiding some devil girl and if you step off the path, you turn to stone. I haven't figured it out yet but seems interesting. THIS GAME IS A WORK OF ART!!! The design style of this game is colorful and playful. The developers put a lot of thought into this. I won this game in a contest from a Steam group, but if I heard of it before, I would have paid money. I'm snuggled on the loveseat right now and am playing my way through!

[h1]Review in English/Spanish Análisis en Inglés y Español:[/h1] [h1] English: [/h1] At first glance The Land of Lamia looks endearing but the controls are complicated, hard and will test your patience. I wouldn’t recommend this game, the good visuals don’t make up for getting annoyed and frustrated with everything else. [h1] Español: [/h1] A primera vista parece un juego tierno y bonito hasta que empiezas a jugar y te tropiezas con los terribles controles. Usualmente soy una persona calmada y tranquila, pero Land of Lamia rebaso los límites de mi paciencia y literalmente estaba gritando al monitor por la frustración. No lo recomiendo, la buena dirección de arte no justifica el mal rato que hace pasar.

The atmosphere seems fantastic? I went into this feeling really positive, but I was kind of flabbergasted by how egregious some of the bad qualities are. 1. The controls are pretty bad. Part of that is a gameplay gimmick that I just happen not to like. You are controlling two characters with a single input. One of them walks faster than the other. The girl walks at a steady rate. The boy either walks slower than the girl or, if you press the run key, faster than the girl. A lot of the challenge (and in my opinion incredible frustration) derives from this mechanic, as you are guiding the characters over narrow paths that they aren't allowed to step off of or else you die and have to start over. This might not have been quite so bad if there were smooth controls, like the ability to move with a joystick, but you are limited to using WASD, making the character movement clunky and jagged, so the WASD controls (sorry PC master race) actually make things significantly worse instead of better in this case. 2. The camera angles can be antagonistic, especially when dealing with the above controls. 3. The above two gripes I probably could have had patience with for a while, but really the worst of all is that the game is just bad at communication. It doesn't tell you what you ARE supposed to do. It doesn't tell you what you're NOT supposed to do. You just start moving these characters and you don't know where you are moving them to or why. Then you will die and you won't understand why. Then you will die again with zero understanding why. It's kinda hard to win at a game that doesn't bother to tell you its objective or its rules. If you like a game that says "die until you figure out what the point of me is" then have fun with this one, but it didn't take me long to go from optimistic to just plain annoyed.

Gave up on first level after fighting the controls and camera angles. Could have dealt with one or the other, but both being a problem is just too time consuming. I like a game to challenge me, not an interface.