I played Rune when it first came out and it was a blast at the time. It reeked charisma from every wound on the protagonist and fine touches such as the possibility to hit your enemies with their own severed limbs never got old. There is a lot of attention to things such as the stances of the protagonist and surely a lot of love got into sequences such as the cavalcade on the giant wasp. If you are a gamer who can put away his or her own modern quality threshold for games, you will be able to enjoy a product that was simply as cool as it could be at the time. The game is very easy on Easy, so please mind that. Run perfectly at 4K on Linux Mint using Heroic Launcher.
This game stands surprisingly solid against the test of time. Story is simple, the character design is cartoonish and they are written like a straight to DVD movie from that era, but damn it feels good.
I am not one for puzzle games usually, but the demo of this one felt so alien that I ended up buying it. And my god what a blast! Not only I was compelled to play through the story in any moment of free time I had, but this title has also opened up the world of analog computing for me and now I am playing around with CVC Rack and pondering whether to buy a THAT. It surely has shortcomings, not so much in the "John Deere hatred"-themed story, which is simple, functional and just, but rather in the missing few features that would have made a game like this even more approachable, like an Undo or a grouping function. But really nothing beats learning that your brain can work in a completely new way, interacting with things you have never seen before and then learnig that until the 1970s those things ruled computing and that they are still around and maybe making a comeback in specific domains!
I am not one for walking simulators usually, but I love myself a short linear game if it has a nice story, and I love the feeling of flow that games like, for example, Flower can give the player. This one indeed has very discrete portions that flow smoothly, but they are: 1. Boring as hell, despite the diversity of environments 2. Continuously broken by the mechanic of soul shifting that requires you to pass from a fast-moving wolf to a falling bird or a terribly slow mole or another mammal. The story is also incredibly cliché, and I would like to tell the developers that you cannot build up to a character-based plot twist when there are only 3 characters interacting in the blandest of ways and also that world-building should happen before using the world feature as a plot point. If I were to guess, I would say the devs stopped caring midway and "had" to develop the rest of the game because of the pledges on Kickstarter.
2 hrs to finish this little gem: the time is spent introducing a few mechanics and then enjoying the moral and ethical repercussions of using them. This is brilliantly achieved through an interesting story, intelligent humor and a deep finale. Controls are not controller-centric and actually include the possibility to play with the mouse as well. It is not difficult, there is no side-anything, it feels more like a long, curated, intelligent joke told by a friend than a modern puzzle platformer. For supporting an independent studio and enjoying the type of product there should be more of, it's definitely worth the price!
While it is true that this game does not make use of all the potential mechanisms that a game brings with it, if one takes it as a piece of media, this makes for a perfectly approachable piece of art that requires the player to take things slowly enough to give space for some deep self-reflection, which is indeed primed often through the game. I didn't particularly appreciate the soundtrack, while I certainly could appreciate the sound design and especially the visuals, which made it look like a hybrid between Nausicaa, eXistenZ, Doug and a Lovecraft novel. If you come in with the right expectation, accepting that not all games will offer hours of difficult puzzles, fast pixel-exact platforming and tons of pointless lore, you will like it as much as I did.
