Note: Although Steam only counts twelve minutes, I played the game for over 40 hours.
Although I think Uru fails overall to be a good adventure game, it has some good qualities, and I'll mention those here first. The game has impressive graphics for a game from 2003, and its clear that the people who made it had a talent for making the most of real-time 3D graphics capabilities of the era. In 2026, I also find the graphics kind of nostalgic, and I love seeing all the tricks the game plays to make the environments feel much more real without exceeding the compute budget.
I also appreciate the sound design of the game. There are loads of small environmental noises in many of the ages that give the impression that the world is constantly changing, with or without the player's input. When things do change in response to the player's input, the sounds are loud enough that you can tell you've done something, but they never sound out place within the environment. Similarly, the soundtrack works very well for the game. Some of the tracks made me feel like I was in an exciting adventure movie, while others felt like something out of a horror film.
The game is really good at giving a feeling of genuine mystery to its ages. It's also one of the best games I've ever seen in terms of giving the player the feeling of going off of the rails and getting to places you shouldn't be. This all adds a lot of excitement whenever you make progress by going somewhere you "shouldn't" be.
Unfortunately, I didn't find that the graphics, sound design, and general feelings evoked by the game were enough to overcome flaws in more core aspects of the game. From the very start, I got the sense that the actual gameplay of the game needed refining. The controls are very strange for a 3D game, and although I got used to them after a few hours, I think they represented a bad start for the game.
The biggest problem I had with the game, however, was the game's puzzles. In the base game, I often got the sense that the designers started with a sensible puzzle that was supported by clues in the game's environment and text, but then added an additional, arbitrary layer of complexity to the puzzle in an attempt to keep it from being too easy. It seemed that the game then failed to hint at the added layers, leaving me questioning whether I put the clues together correctly in the first place. When I did find a solution, whether by chance, brute force, or via a hint guide, the game also failed to confirm the reasoning for the solution after the fact, leaving me with a sense that the solution was somewhat random.
The problem seems even worse in Path of the Shell, though I got the sense less often that the designers had started with a sensible puzzle. In many cases, I had to consult a hint guide and, even after knowing the solution, I was unable to find a sensible set of clues that might have led me to the solution myself. In at least two cases, I was also unsure why my solution wouldn't work and could only attribute the problem to bugs in the game. In those cases, I think the game should have made it clearer to the player why the solution they gave was the correct one.
Although the game has a dearth of clues, it has a wealth of writing for the player to find throughout the world. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the writing in the game has no bearing on the game's puzzles. I think the game could have been improved much by offering better clues through the notes, books, and letters scattered throughout the game world.
