Golem

I was driven to buy Golem based on its art style, which I found (and, four levels in, still find) quite interesting. The level design is beautiful, and the golem character itself is quite interesting. Given the highly dynamic camera, you can zoom in on any area of the map and just enjoy the art at any time, or zoom out and try to take the whole thing in. Performance is good on my laptop, and the fast forward function helps with the backtracking when you miss a puzzle. Gameplay-wise, Golem is a bit of a let down. You click, and your character moves along a set route. I get that this is necessary when your golem actually starts moving on its own and you need to have two characters moving at the same time, but as a result I'm not really invested in the character as much as I was with (for example) Limbo. Which is a shame... there's an interesting story hinted here, but I just really can't push myself to care. I did have problems with installation; I tried to install this through GoG Galaxy, and it just didn't work. After almost a week, I decided to download the standalone installer and install the game like that. Only then did it work, and link to Galaxy. But by that point I wasn't as interested in playing this game as I had been, and I decided to play three other games first.

This puzzle game is challenging and fun, with colourful environments. Through only animation, music and gameplay you learn the story of this girl and her people. She finds a lone golem which helps throughout the game and goes through many shapes, each with it's own function. By the end I was engrossed in this and found the ending to be quit sad. There aren't many games games these days I care enough about to get emotionally invested; this was one of them.

The controls are stuck halfway between designed for a mouse as a point-and-click puzzle solver or for a game controller as a pseudo-platformer (which it really looks like it should be a platformer of some sort, visually); you'll spend the entire game either awkwardly moving a mouse cursor with a thumbstick or else awkwardly sliding various in-game lever actions with the mouse. Seriously, why couldn't they either map the sliders to override the mouse wheel, or perhaps wasd, while such an action bar is open, or else map movement to the thumbsticks and let you activate whatever you've walked to with a button (instead of having to always select the target from a distance)? Oh, and the fact that the walking is so slow that the devs felt the need to implement a fast forward control doesn't exactly help either. Finally, I just had the game crash because my PC is stupid and randomly disconnected from the internet while the game was launched. AFAICT there was no other potential trigger. I really want to love this game, I really do. Unfortunately, it's just frustrating as hell.

It's a nice, relaxing and enyoyable environmental puzzle game with a great soundtrack and minimalist story. Alert: ignore OpenCritic rating, it confounds this game with "The Golem" (a sokoban puzzle game) and "Golem" (a VR action game and originally relaesed for PS4). So a lot of really low ratings in that score that actually are meant for other games!!!