Recent reviews by BinarySplit

I couldn't find where the actual gameplay was... I explored for half an hour, read a bunch of letters, but couldn't find any way to make any progression. After scouring the map for anything I could have missed, I gave up and refunded it.

It's HARRDDD. If you enjoyed the original Myst, you'll love RHEM. If you're the kind of person that easily gets stuck and frustrated, RHEM is probably too difficult. I enjoyed a lot of the puzzles, but had to look up hints/solutions for many others, and ultimately gave up before finishing it.

The other caveat is that this game is technically pretty janky. Once most of the map opens up, you'll find you have to spend a lot of time back-tracking and even though you know exactly where to go, it takes a LONG time to navigate between areas, even with transitions turned off. Also, sometimes Esc takes you to the menu, sometimes it quits the game without saving. I lost some progress accidentally this way.

If those two things don't bother you, then RHEM IV is absolutely worth playing. The puzzles are really good and there are a lot of them.

BIG CAVEAT: The sequel is a mess that's not really worth playing even if you can get past the softlocks.

RtMI is a flawed but relatively fun twist on the standard adventure game formula. The big innovation is that there are many ways to achieve most goals. Sometimes you'll fail and lose items, but there will always another way. However, the alternative ways may not always be obvious and that's the bad side of the game. It's easy to miss stuff, so sometimes you're stuck pixel hunting or trying to combine every item with every other item.

Overall, the story is pretty cool, the puzzles are a bit easy but still fun, but the exploration / finding items for solving puzzles part is a bit frustrating. Overall it was a positive experience, and considering I got it for NZ$1 (90%-off) it was definitely good value for money.

Recommendation: Wait for a sale. Avoid the sequel.

Pros: You get to play as the monkey, which adds a few more interesting puzzles

Cons: The story is less compelling and the puzzles are even more obtuse than the first game. Also, it's possible to still make several hours of progress AFTER unknowingly putting the game in an unwinnable state. It's actually pretty easy to softlock - I found quite a few people complaining about it when I went looking for solutions.

UPDATE: I hex-edited my save so that I could get past the softlock. The endings weren't worth it.

I regret waiting so long to try Quern. I cannot imagine a better Uru-like puzzle game. Originally I assumed it was more of a Myst-like, where puzzle-solving requires a lot more patience than I actually have. However Quern had exactly the right amount of difficulty - clues aren't excessively difficult to find, every puzzle requires enough thinking that nothing feels like busywork, and it never let me feel like I was playing by unfair rules so I was never tempted to check a walkthrough.

Recommendation: Don't even wait for a sale. It's incredibly good.

There's a plenty of good in this game, but also quite a bit of bad. Unfortunately, as a completely linear adventure game, the overall enjoyment is easily ruined by repeatedly hitting dead ends. And Corrosion certainly tries to trip you up in a variety of ways! You'll need to pixel-hunt, need to keep trying different variations on the same solution, need to keep re-checking the environment for changes, try to combine every inventory item with every other inventory item, etc. And to top it all off, when you finally feel like you're getting the hang of it, the puzzles stop and the game switches to story exposition mode, bombarding you with 10s of pages of diaries in various hard-to-read handwriting fonts.

It's frustrating because there were plenty of good parts - the storytelling was great until near the end and most of the puzzles were pretty fun - but after the leap of logic needed to solve one of the first few puzzles I just didn't have confidence this game was playing by reasonable rules and I kept the walkthrough open.

It was only 14 minutes long, but it's free so I'll cut it some slack. Great puzzle design - everything had enough difficulty to feel rewarding, but nothing was obtuse. I hope these devs make more!

Overall pretty fun, and recommended if you've already played most of the other escape room games on Steam.

It's not at the same level as the top-tier games (House of DaVinci, Eyes of Ara, etc.), but it has fun and well designed puzzles, respects your time, has a satisfying conclusion, and is well priced for its level of content.

I got to room 6 and by that point the awful FPS had given me motion sickness so I just gave up and refunded. I can comfortably play games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Death Stranding with this GPU, I don't understand why Seven Doors' bland, polygonated dirt walls brought my GPU to it's knees, but I draw the line at games that make me feel unwell.

The first two rooms show some promise, but they're over within minutes. Rooms 3-6 are either not puzzles at all or are the kind of puzzles that require more trial and error than lateral thinking.

As a fan of escape room games, I really enjoyed Escapeworld Dilemma. The puzzle design was fantastic and most of it was unlike anything I had seen in other games.

However, it needs a warning: there's no tutorial, no learning curve, etc. it just throws you immediately into hard puzzles. I needed quite a few hints (the dev actively helps on the forums) before I got into the right mindset to find the solutions myself. That said, I appreciate it - it didn't hold my hand and now I'm a better puzzle solver as a result.