sadmammal

It's far too nothing. And it does make me feel somehow bad because this does feel like a labor of love. But the narrative, as easy to see you represented in it as it can be, it's far too saccharine and brief and surface level to be poignant. The idea of an escape room-like game as a vehicle for an exploration of memory is a nice one (even if not the newest idea on the block in the escape room camp), but the problem, for me, is it doesn't propose anything that makes gameplay and storytelling hit harder, feel like they do stuff together, that they're not just a series of tasks that must be completed because what would be a game without tasks to complete. At its best, the game feels like a kinetic novel (and if that's the point, why bother with puzzles); at its worst, the game stops you with a pointless puzzle box with the solution written on another room in plain text. Maybe the random touching that sometimes destroys a room felt more important than any puzzle because it made me feel the anger, the desperation, and the playfulness of a relationship that the rest of the game it's severely lacking. The art is nice, sometimes really nice, the experience feels alright enough, and the musical motif is slightly overused (and that's a lot in a game as short as this one), but I kept waiting on the crying and the chills and the satisfaction in this very celebrated game.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]