Subject 13

I am an experienced adventure game player and like both first and third person adventure puzzles. This games screen shots, description and price drew me in but I was left feeling so disappointed after playing it. The puzzles lack imagination and challenge and I finished the game in under 3 hours. It is so sad because the story had potential. This game could have been so much more. What a waste.

The first level is really engaging. For the most part the puzzles seem integrated into the environment and seem to have an explanation for being there. Further levels devlove more and more into thinly veiled logic-games with little to no rhyme-or-reason to being in the world, the last straw of which was a smashing round of Minesweeper. The worldbuilding seems enjoyable, but it's explored through three very flat characters with flatter voice-acting. I tend to see puzzle-exploration games through to their end, but I had to put this one down near the end of the third level.

In-short: Simple, short and buggy. Some of the puzzles can't be solved (cause you can't see the parts you need to solve the puzzle). Except for that it is hunting for hidden items, sliding puzzles and minesweeper. The controls is very obviously ported from a console controller and is very clonky and annoying to use with a mouse. For example the controls for picking inspect, interact or read is movement pressure based, like it was meant to be operated with the analog stick of a gamepad this means you will have to keep pushing the mouse cursor slowly off the screen to not go back into the center. All in all a cute game, but the bugs, relatively easy puzzles and horrible controls make it an none memorable experience.

What a disappointment. Given the credentials and the very Soma premise I expected the typical adventure tropes of unravelling a mistery reading old diaries while you examine the world and try to fit the pieces, but instead of that, ok, you get the diaries, but the exploration is minimal and the puzzles are the worst kind of mechanical puzzles. It looks like something that was thought to me used with touch controls, which makes it awful to control with the mouse. And the puzzles? Doing 7th Guest kind of stuff to advance the plot? Only worked back then because of the novelty factor. And there are too many sliders, and I already disliked sliders. Play it only if you already have finished the Kingart, Daedalic, Wadjet Eye, Future Games, Cranberry, Telltale (etc) adventures before.

There's certainly a lot of promise in the start of the game. Then you start to play... The puzzles are often confusing. They're not difficult, in the sense that you have to think hard about them, but they are frustrating in that they don't relate to anything in the story or levels. It's like those mobile games where you have to solve a sliding grid puzzle to open a door. Why would a door have that on it? The most frustrating part of all, though, are the controls. There were puzzles where I *knew* what the solution was, but I couldn't get the controls to co-operate. The camera controls seem to be designed to troll the user. Objects are often off screen. The cog icon (to indicate an interactive object) appears in the wrong place. Selecting one of the three sub objects (take, examine, zoom in) randomly fails. There are plenty of little bugs. Text layers on books doing z-fighting with the paper. Clicking fails to be recognised. Save game restores you to a random previous point. The last puzzle (a *massive* minesweeper) took the biscuit. Some of the grid cells became unclickable. Solution? Restart the game from that point. The "big reveal" is neither big nor any kind of revelation. There is no mind-bending paradox. Look elsewhere for good puzzle games.