Goetia

I picked this game up on a bit of a whim because I liked the visual style and what little I'd gleaned of the story. I'm glad I did so, as it offered a different experience from what I had anticipated and brought me back to earlier games when puzzles were hard, and you needed to keep notes (mental or otherwise) to work things out. As a non-musically inclined person, I did end up resorting to walkthroughs on occasion to help me out, especially with the musical puzzles. Without that resource you can expect to spend quite a bit of extra time wandering the manor or futilely clicking away at puzzles. One piece of advice though - don't play it on a track-pad like I did; without the chance cursor change when idly mousing around you might miss entire puzzles! Clickable underlined words in a book, I'm looking at you here. Story wise it's an interesting and quite dark script. There is plenty of back story to discover (I mean, that's what the game is about!), and there are several interesting ideas raised. I'm not sure I found the ending particularly satisfying, yet I cannot complain about it because it fitted the story. In my view it suffered from the one shortcoming that seemed to last throughout the game - I didn't feel particularly emotionally invested in the character(s). For a tale as grim as this, I'd have hoped for a bit more despair. Or maybe I just watch too much soul crushing anime and expect too much here... Overall, this is a solid game, and if you like solving puzzles you should check it out.

More puzzle game than adventure. Very complex, and surely well done. But it's tailored to a specific type of player, which I'm not.

This game has an interesting concept, you're playing as the spirit of a dead family member who has returned to the family manor. You don't know exactly why you're there, but quickly learn that your family is the kind of family that summons demons for kicks, and now everyone is missing. As you wander about the house and surrounding area you uncover more of the story through journal entries you find and puzzles you solve. And solving these puzzles is where we start running into trouble. Now I like adventure games, and I like some hard puzzles, but I'm also not going to let a puzzle leave me stuck for days at a time so I'm not adverse to looking at walkthroughs. And sometimes when I look at walkthroughs I'll say 'I should have thought of that' or 'That's some strange logic they're using to get that solution', but with this game I see the solution, and I see the 'clues' that I have to work with, and I still don't know how the two relate. I'll say that a lot of the puzzles in the game are fine and solvable as they are, but many are not and I don't even know where I went wrong along the way. Also, there is one puzzle that (MINOR SPOILERS) requires you to have the ability to transcribe notes from hearing music, so if you can't do that be warned.

My expectations were virtually non existant and I was pleasantly surprised in the beginning, as this game is intriguing and immersing, but after the first two hours or so it starts to get extremely convoluted and messy. Riddles not working correctly (E.g. the scale riddle, is bugged as F!), the game sh*tting all over you with useless "info" that makes it hard to sift through what is a hint and what is actually just a useless collectible, walking around with about a dozen of solutions to riddles you haven't even encountered yet, to some extremely obscure answers that make no logical sense even in the context of the game, all these flaws are infuriating and pile up extremely quickly. And no, I don't mean these riddles are "hard" or you have to pay extreme attention to detail, they are utterly garbage and expect and answer that no logical thinking person would EVER try, because they make no sense whatsoever. If you wanna get it for the art style and the general idea, I'd say only do it if it's on sale (-75% or more!), because as much as I love the artwork and the premise, the devs clearly had no idea whatsoever how to construct good riddles and just ended up half-*ssing a large part of them. The way your character thinks alone is extremely illogical, e.g. she recognises a "magnetic tape player" but don't know how to use one... I mean, that's the logical equivalent to somebody knowing exactly how DVDs are made, while being unable to put them into a DVD player and pushing "play". And that's happening A LOT. E.g. she clearly knows something to be a generator but again, wonders how this works. Really? How wrote this drivel, nobody thinks like this. NO ONE. So to reiterate, broken puzzles, bugs, dumb premises, bad riddle design all take away massively from what could be an actually amazing game. The devs risked quite a few things to move away from classic point and click gameplay, but failed at the core which is required: actually good riddles.