I'm a Neverhood fan and a Doug fan. But this is getting one star for the quality of the animation and the amazing designs Doug comes up with for worlds and characters. It's losing the other four stars for being an unplayable, badly planned mess. Warning: Spoilers ahead. I'll keep them vague but I can't fully describe the problems with this game without them. I'm a game designer, and I appreciate wanting to make things hard for the player. But this game doesn't allow players to actually *solve* puzzles by thinking them through. From room one, it's nothing but what I call "guess what the designer was thinking" puzzles. You click randomly on stuff hoping that something will happen, because there aren't any indicators to guide the player's mind towards solutions. There's no way to see the inventory items you've gathered, so you just click blindly on room objects hoping something you've got will be correct. And worse, there are things you can try as Tommynaut that don't work, giving you no reason to suspect they would work by changing to Beak-Beak instead (for example, pushing a button). Or turning a crank to reveal a door, and finding out later that you should keep turning the crank to reveal a second room from the exact same door. It's physically illogical and most players would only resort to it because, like all the other puzzles in this game, it falls to "okay, I've tried everything that makes sense, so let me just keep clicking stuff in the hopes that *something* will happen". Same thing with getting the backstory of Armikrog from the vine monster, without which you can't proceed in the game - clicking it as Tommynaut does nothing, giving you no reason to think clicking it as Beak-Beak will. I gave up in the baby mobile puzzle - I could see the answer, but by that point I was so frustrated that I didn't care anymore. Having to refer to a walkthrough in every room just to *start* a game should never be necessary. A visually stunning waste of time.
