The Sojourn

Interesting puzzles, a decent addition to the 'first person puzzler' genre, but something about it just makes me bored playing after only 20-30 minutes, so I have to play it in smaller chunks. Maybe it's the slow movement speed and the inability to sprint (which is required for the puzzles to work), or the sterile environment with story notes so vague they might as well not be there. Regardless, the puzzles are quite clever and include optional difficulties, which are quite fun to tackle. It's not as strong as The Talos Principle series or the Portal series, but it's good enough to play and recommend.

I'm only partway through, but my initial impressions are that this game is wonderful. It's great to get away from the over complicated nature of today's games, with battle passes and limited time events and inventories with 1500 items, having to go out and grind for gear, and sit there forced to listen to (or read) NPCs talking to each other for hours. This game brings back the simplicity of games I haven't seen in a while. You have basically two core concepts: following the mostly textless, symbolic journey of life, and solving short puzzles in each area to advance to the next. (I appreciate that I'm not forcefully paused to read/click through a bunch of conversations before getting back to actually playing. It's mostly just statues or animations as you're walking by, that tell a story.) This game is beautiful. I love the art style (which is the main reason I bought it) and effects and level / environment design. The sound design and music are really good too. There's something really pleasant about even the sounds of the level forming together out of crumbled material when you first walk into it. The puzzles so far have been satisfying as well, with a good progression from introductory/basic sample levels introducing a new concept, to subsequent levels building on those concepts and getting a little harder each time to keep you interested. (I've gone through around 22 puzzles so far and 6 bonus puzzles.) There is an area with two optional bonus puzzles that you can walk past, and I wish the game told you if you could go back and do these later even if you skip them. I'm not sure if you can, but that was the first thing I looked for before continuing. Based on a forum post it sounds like you may be able to after finishing the game. Also of note, this game doesn't mention anything about VR support, but automatically launches SteamVR when you run it. You can disable that by adding -nohmd to the launch options. Or you can try what seems like kind of an automatic built-into-the-engine vr headset support by adding -vr to the launch options. It looks pretty with the headset, but you can't see any of the menus (you have to navigate them blind by checking how to navigate them in flatscreen mode first), and any of the instruction text on screen which explains new puzzle concepts, is far off to the top left so you can't really see it in your headset or on your screen if you have vr mode enabled. It also doesn't support VR controllers. So the hidden VR mode isn't functional enough to work for your first playthrough. Maybe if you wanted to play through it a second time after figuring out all the concepts. It does work with a gamepad, which is nice.