Relicta

I’m not sure which genre Relicta fits in. The moment I started the game, I was amazed by the shear beauty of the environments. As a game, I think it won’t fit the description of beeing a game in the traditional sense. It’s more an explorer walk-sim playing with weird looking boxes, magnetism that sometimes don’t make sense for the non-scientists among us. For now, I don’t think about it. I’m just walking through nice looking corridoes and pick up a magnetobox and toss it against a magneto wall and change polarity that the box can fall down on the ground. Neat. In all honesty, it’s best not to see Relicta as a game. But as it is so beautifully made, if you want to relax or had a stressful day at work come to Relicta, and toss some magnetic stress cubes agains anything magnetic, jump around, enjoy the scenery.

Failed to implement it, failed to make it cohesive, failed to make it believable, and just failed in the design. 4.5/10. The environments are nice conceptually, but the graphical fidelity and consistency is all over the place, with nonsensical visual culling, textures that drag you back to the days of Borderlands, and shoddy modeling, where some look fine, and others look incredibly out of place or dated relative to the rest. The gameplay screams Portal aspirant, with a primary focus on physics-based manipulation. Too bad that's all the game has; no other tricks, no environmental cohesion or logic, and too shallow of integration to make it last like in Portal. By the time you get to your first real area, it's incredibly boring and bland, where even your brain just checks out and refuses to cooperate. The writing is just bad. Poor dialogue, unclear and impotent relationships, with a general feel of incorrect social-form attribution. A couple PhD-touting scientists talking like Redditors? Really? Oh yes, the head-not-head scientist, your main character, suddenly swears like a sailor when confronted with a tech issue when she was previously calm and collected in general, totally makes sense. Finally, the woke angle. Sadly, the production company is known for supporting woke and/or slop content, and it shows here. Girlboss character roles all over, an implied lesbian relationship with the main character, which disturbingly echoes in the way that the main character talks to *her daughter,* and a general lack of care or cohesion with the few male characters in the game. It's nowhere near as bad as other titles, but you can see the slop seep through the cracks in this game. Overall, this game looks, feels, sounds, and plays like it is 80% done, or even as only a beta in some segments. This could have been a good game, but it needs a significant amount of work and fleshing out to make it happen. Otherwise, glad I got it for sub-$5.

Stricktly from a design pov, there are many things Relicta could improve on: - The game design of the core mechanics is complete enough, but the rest needs serious improvement, as the visual grammar is working against the player. Surrounded by invisible walls, the world looks open, but we end up bumping against walls like in a crystal maze. Not only that, but some of the dressing out of bounds really invite you to explore, just to bump against an invisible wall. Really frustrating. - The world design is counter intuitive. Again, invisible wall prevent you to go onto the next puzzle, when a simple drop would allow you to (I understand it is designed for you to exit the level once it is solved, but it doesn't look great in the lore. - The level design could have been worked on more to ensure the rules are taught properly. - Most of the puzzles rely on physics, which, when not mastered, can provoke frustration (and it is the case here), but it also mean many of the puzzle can easily be broken. You can skip some sections, sometimes by mistake. Also, you can make yourself stuck (it does happen only very rarely, but reseting a puzzle doesnt leave me with the best taste in my mouth. - Convoluted puzzles that make them tricky by their size to grasp properly. You don't know where to start, where to go. It creates artificial difficulty that isn't much rewarding for the player to figure out... - Long sections of traversal out of the puzzle, to establish the lore and hide collectible, but the design of the base is rather counter intuitive, because the accent is put on the visuals more than the navigation. I just wished I could have skipped those gameplay-less sections. - While being subjective, the art is well too saturated, giving the impression of seeing everything painted with a highlighter, causing strain on the eyes and drowning the essential. - Missing materials on a few blueprints (nothing catastrophic)... For all those reasons, and probably more, I cannot recommend.

As there are apparently people (≥ one person) commenting the demo on the non-demo page I want to do the same for justice's sake, until I will finish this game sometime for a full review. The demo version was a great pleasure to play. I unconditionally recommend buying the game after the demo. No bugs, glitches, crashes or soft-locks! Every section auto-saves and can be restarted but I never really needed it. The game is big, likely because of the immersive stunning environments. It also feels like an adventure game. I always stopped and took a look into the environment. Amazing for such a small dev team, and it runs well in latest Wine, Garuda on a 11th Gen intel GPU on 720p. All options are there, even for the style of subtitles and up to 4 possible keys for every action :-) ! For me, personally, I played the German written version and the writing is extraordinary, top-notch, sounding like emails that I would write. Playful. For me, this feels authentic and sometimes even fun to read. In my personal opinion, this is much better than average. I also liked how well the fiction was thought out, explained. After thinking about it, the odd things in the game even made sense for the story's setting. Overall, it looks polished to me. The (English) voice acting and language is apparently not on the same quality, I found the cursing too much – wondering, if they saved money with the English part. It's a bit strange that one voice actress with eastern European accent speaks all the female people, even when talking to her child (they could just speak their normal language). The only sad point is that there is no interaction with other characters. All of the environment is devoid of life except for occassional voice clips and static images on computer screens in the base station. After all, a very well made (demo) game. The sections were just right in difficulty. I never needed too long to figure out how to beat them and still they became somewhat elaborate later.

Don't even try to think about whether the story for this game makes sense, because it's utterly obvious it is just whatever nonsense they could wrap around the puzzles. It would actually be a better game if it didn't HAVE a story and was just a collection of puzzles you could approach in any order. I know if I were an auditor checking into this place, I'd be strongly tempted to fire every single researcher and shut the place down as a waste of budget, because you were supposed to be studying these effects and instead you've wasted your time building puzzles?!? I got about five hours in before I ran into a puzzle so obscure and convoluted that I couldn't even figure out what on earth I was supposed to achieve in order to get past it. Sorry, that's it, fun killed, done here. 'bye.