Overall most helpful review

Posted on: July 21, 2014

Adokat

Games: 153 Reviews: 5

A wonderful, mysterious experience

Ether One is an engaging, dreamlike adventure game, set inside the abandoned town of Pinwheel. Soothing painterly art (a deliberate choice as you'll discover) captures the serene but lonely atmosphere perfectly. As a 'Restorer,' you are actually exploring the mind of a patient suffering from dementia. What information you do collect is rarely obtuse, and tells you just enough without stooping to exposition, fitting with the theme of the game. This gameplay reminds me most of titles like Myst, as you explore abandoned areas, attempting to rebuild what has been damaged . There's an underlying logic to every puzzle, and each takes considerable thought to solve. Puzzles require items and information from multiple areas, as well as a fair bit of logical reasoning. You use items to solve puzzles, and each can been examined from all sides. Determining which object is useful (many are junk) and finding its function is another challenge. Pen and paper is highly recommended to keep track of everything. Not understanding the British terms for some objects has tripped me up a few times, so make sure to fully examine each object and its name. You can always warp back to an area that functions as a little home/retreat, where you can store items and some important documents From what I gather, you can actually progress through the game without solving any puzzles, but if you're going to do that, I think it's missing the point of the experience.

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Posted on: June 29, 2019

scjacobson

Verified owner

Games: 19 Reviews: 1

Choose the NON-REDUX under "extras"!!!

The REDUX version is absolute crap HOWEVER under the EXTRAS section you can download the original that works perfectly fine and I think even visually is more appealing!

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Posted on: May 20, 2019

LotBlind

Verified owner

Games: 164 Reviews: 7

Install the NON-REDUX version!

Firstly, to get this out of the way, support for the REDUX version of the game seems to be gone, from the developers' side. Doesn't seem to be anything GOG can do to help you either based on a long support conversation. Instead you CAN get the NON-REDUX version running and it seems to work fine. This is under "extras". So I'm basically reviewing that version except they're not really so different. There's supposed to be a graphical improvement (since it's a newer Unreal Engine patch) but you honestly aren't missing much in my opinion. The game itself: good if you aren't expecting something other than walking about the environments, unraveling a plot and solving (mostly optional) puzzles. If you ignore the extra puzzles it might take you 5 hours to finish. If you try to solve all of them (gives you an additional little post-ending thing that you can honestly just watch a Let's Player play through), it might take 25 hours. I'm giving the plot a 4.5/5. A novel idea, and I was caught by surprise. Some people think it's moving, and while I'm not a very sentimental guy, I do like its themes a lot and feel it's a game with a very relevant topic. The pacing of the game is kind of funny since most likely, you'll run into 80% of the plot pretty quickly, after which you can spend a long time going around trying to solve more puzzles, then another 20% plot. Non-spoilery things you might want to know in advance: - I really overthought a lot of the puzzles. Usually, but not always, what you need is in the near vicinity and the obvious thing to do is the correct one. I would NOT rate this as super-challenging puzzle game. You ARE likely to overlook some details so don't be ashamed of looking at the walkthrough on Steam (it's really good). - You can use the artifact on all blue-glowy things (and nothing else). - Don't miss the mine entrance. It's between the harbour and the industrial center.

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Posted on: September 26, 2014

DarkEmoElf

Verified owner

Games: 284 Reviews: 8

A BUGGY LOAD OF BOLLOCKS!

Whilst the game is quite an interesting concept it is way too buggy (despite all the patches) and never should have been released like this this, I would never recommend it to anyone, the main issue I have is that even though I have completed some areas and the lights are lit up on the board with the four areas on, when I returned to one of these areas the light has gone out and none of the puzzles have been solved and I have to do them all again, WTF! Due to so many issues with this game, like the well known problem with the lift to the offices with the barometer in, I have now completely lost all faith in the game, I mean what's the fucking point in trying to solve the puzzles if you can't be sure that the game is working correctly and that you are not just wasting your time because you might have got it right but because the game is broke it won't work. Example: One of the lights in the art room in the school needs a UV bulb put in it but it wouldn't allow me to do it, I eventually quit the game in frustration and when I tried again later it worked, WTF was that about, I wasted an hour fucking around with that crap, I can't be bothered to list the other issues I've had with this game but needless to say I'm sick of it and can't be bothered wasting my time trying to finish it! A BUGGY LOAD OF BOLLOCKS!

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Posted on: April 9, 2014

Spec_Of_Chaos

Verified owner

Games: 37 Reviews: 3

Poorly optimised and underwhelming.

The art assets were very nice, The world is well-constructed and very open, though the level design is not very intuitive, so getting lost does happen. Also the game sometimes doesn't tell you what to do AND doesn't give you enough of a hint, so at one point I did have to look up a walkthough. Unfortunately this well-constructed world was crippled by poor frame rates and a poorly written story. You never meet any of the other characters, and I never felt like I learned who they were. Towards the end the story starts to become more about the player character, but we are never told about who it is we are playing as. The game really isn't optimised well, at one point I turned my screen resolution down to 640 x 480 which got rid of all the lag, but it also made my eyes saw. (For comparison, the computer I was using has the following: i7 Quad Core CPU 16GB ram Nvidia Quadro 1000M GPU) The story was told badly and either having laggy controls or saw eyes was not ideal. When the game ended I had absolutely no desire to play it again. For a retail price of £12, I do not think this game was worth it.

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