Lake Ridden

Go into Lake Ridden with the right expectations, and it is a rewarding experience. The art is lovely without being sensationalist. The pace is a slow and steady, with some really great puzzles that are not obvious, so you have to think, but also are not so hard they become frustrating (plus, there is a handy hint system that absolves the need for external help). Some of the dialogue is iffy, and the visuals do have this annoying feature where your screen zooms slightly whenever you run your avatar (presumably to simulate leaning forward while you run) that makes me occasionally nauseous. It's not perfect, but if what you're looking for is a relaxing world full of puzzles and magic, Lake Ridden is a treat.

The game is not really bad by itself, but it has no solid good point for it. It is a walking simulator, but you hardly ever have a good sight, especially in the end where you have a fog which is so dim, that you will loose a lot of time to orient yourself and go to the place you intend to go. There are some lanterns that you can light to help, but this won't arrange much the situation. For the immersion and interactive parts, you will find many objects, lanterns and drawers, but hardly ever useful. For lanterns and drawers, you will find tons of them. I initially tried to light all the lanterns, but as this seems completely useless, and there are too many, I quickly gave up with that "challenge". For drawers, why did they put so many, and so few really are interesting. The amount of drawers in that game is ridiculous… and most of them contain the same thing. As others said, the story is not interesting, and if it were, would not be worth so much wandering. Puzzles are poorly presented. I recommend to read the hints, because in all honesty, they will not spoil much and will provide better problem statements than the elements you will find out. As a summary, the game has no real flaw (beside some issues with some savegames, but you can still start from beginning of the chapter without losing much progression), but really has nothing for it. There are so many games in this category which are way better…

If you're looking for a decent Myst-like game to spend a weekend on, this will probably hold your attention for about that length of time. The story was interesting but a little hard to follow. The game's biggest flaws were its rather illogical puzzles and its lack of visually exciting environments. The visuals I can forgive somewhat as it's an indie game made by a small team, but it does reuse art assets to a point that exploration is tedious rather than fun, which in an exploration-based game is not good. The environment is also a little underutilized. Many locations are not necessary to visit, and others you come back to over and over. The bad puzzles are a serious drawback. Many areas can only be accessed by solving mechanical locks that are just puzzles for the sake of puzzles. Puzzle boxes scattered around are similar, though most are not essential to completing the game and just contain extra story fragments. Most of the essential puzzles though tend to be illogical, with solutions based on weird interpretations of the problem that often make no sense even after you've solved them. For instance there is a puzzle where you need to find symbols scattered around a room and input them as a code, but the order you need to put them in is not apparent and can only be found through trial and error. Another requires you to move a toy ship to different locations on a board according to directions you discover, but again there is no obvious order in which the directions are supposed to go. Usually the rules or objective of a puzzle are not made apparent and figuring out what result you're supposed to achieve is as much a puzzle as the puzzle itself. Maybe some people consider this an extra layer of challenge but I find it to be bad puzzle design.

Played this game via my steam account. Would have prefered to get it on GOG thought. Mainly because of DRM. The game itself has some excellent puzzles. At first I thought they were easy, but then they started to vary in difficulty and scope. I work as a programmer and I had a lot of help from my proffesional experience in this game. For some of the puzzles, I had to exit the game and come back a bit later. With a blank slate on my thinking process.

wanted to like this game as i love point and click mysterious games but there were so many annoyances that sucked the fun out of it. Mainly the exploration aspects and unskippable puzzles. Exploration was thru a drab misty world and the only gameplay was to gather snippets of diaries and pics in order to figure out what happened there. Travel was 1st person and the movement was slow, pressing the run key only had intermittant increase of speed to be laughable, maybe 2 sec bursts. The devs used the same art assets throughout the game, drawers contained the same items and even the cabinets were the same 3 models. You were able to open drawers and chests but they were mainly empty, i think after opening scores of those same assets i found maybe 3 items to the point where i ignored them. There are puzzles, some you have to work out a box with doo dads to twist, some were environmental where you fixed an item in order to progress. Most were pleasant but the boxes were obnoxious, repetitious with little reward, maybe a picture or a diary page with few info. There is no option to skip the puzzle boxes and after the same puzzle five times in a row i was over it. The rest of the exploration was enjoyable, but the game mainly consists of a walking simulator, light lamp simulator and open drawers simulator with a few arcane puzzles with crap hints to figure them out, it just wore thin and any charm of the game was lost to annoyances. skip or buy on deep sale