The Sojourn

I would give it 3.5/5. The presentation is ok. The background looks promising and interesting, but you quickly find out it is there only to look at from the distance. You are confined to a fairly limited premises of the puzzle at hand or occasional sculpted story snapshot. Nevertheless, it sets the mood nicely. The "story" is presented by a sequence of unmoving sceenes without any direct commentary and is pretty generic, without much detail and specifics to be really called a story. After solving optional challeneges, the player is presented with scrolls containing deep and wise sounding out of context trivialities of questionable merit. Among them, some conjectures presenting conspiracy theorist worldview are interspersed, which is also the impression of the "story". For this I take down one star, because it is really off-putting. The game itself is quite good. It is a bit on the easier side, but some good challenges are wainting in later stages. Some reviewers complain it is repetitive, wanting some new meachanic every other level. I feel like every level presents some new interaction between the mechanics already known. Maybe not always that interesting, but I did not feel I am solving a level already solved. The levels are easy, because they are usually quite limited with only a few objects and paths to interact with, so you usually quickly deplete all possibilities but the right one. I think using isometric or some other global view would allow for some bigger and more complicated puzzles. Also, in the first person view you are much more aware of your immediate limits, which makes it feel easier. Unfortunately, the toughest challenges for me were not tough for the right reasons. They were tough because I had to poise on an edge to be able to make seemingly impossible visual connection or because I had to move quickly and try to cut corners through some tightly timed section. For this I would drop the 0.5 star.