Amber City Reviews

Amber City up to level 7 is playable on a Steam Deck, I have not gotten past that point yet. The game is good. I think there are 8~10 levels, about 5 hours of content if you are a trying to get 100%. Later in the game you can pick between one of three buffs. Only one of them seems to be useful, maybe alter this somehow? Like, give me each of the buffs for a single puzzle earlier in the game?

art and game experience improved a lot from Flood of Light! super enjoyable

just like the first game, really nice ! story is pretty intriguing as well

Its just Flood of Light but better in every way. Better translation, better artwork, and more mechanics.

This immensely beautiful puzzle adventure is as well done as its demo. I would have liked it to be a bit more "casual" which it's tagged as, but I was glad that it's not much of a platformer and I guess my brain could use the workout. I usually have a pretty low tolerance for puzzles that make me think hard for more than a minute or two and have become an avid user of walkthroughs, but something about this game made me continue and even have a (mostly) good time. The pretty background art and contemplative piano music in Amber City create such a calming atmosphere that I stuck around through all the "How?? There's NO WAY this can be solved" until I arrived at "OMG THIS is how... no wait, fuck" and finally at "YESSS" and it was so satisfying when all the right lamps got lit and the way forward unlocked. Though I have a little perfectionist in me that wanted to try and 100% the game, but after a second of considering it I was like NOPE lol. There's a sense of progression as you visit newly available areas, get new abilities for more sophisticated puzzles, and pick up pieces of lore. There aren't any elaborate characters or anything mind-blowing, but the story felt like much less of an afterthought than in most other puzzle adventures that I know of. The writing was decent and I should add that the English translation was good as well, I can't remember noticing more than a few minor errors. Not to mention that this game had a polished feel with no need for major patches after release. Worked like a charm with Steam Play for Linux too. Accessibility info: a certain (mostly low) degree of quick reactions is required, but mechanics are almost always forgiving. Most levels after the first few have a hostile type of robot that you need to avoid getting lasered by, but they didn't stress me much (and I get stressed [i]very[/i] easily). They only have a small radius each and are very predictable. If they do hit you, time just rewinds a few seconds. And then one screen towards the end had a sort of "boss" where you had to do sequences of actions very quickly. I struggled a lot with that one and really would have preferred being able to skip it. For the last sequence I ended up taking a screenshot and alt-tabbing out of the game to figure out what to do. I guess it's a non-issue if you're any good at platformers or other dexterity-based gameplay. As I mentioned it's not much of a platformer otherwise, no precision jumps or anything of the sort. All in all I really enjoyed this one. Easy recommendation if you like mental challenges with a story and nice surroundings and can handle at least one series of Quick Time Events. As the demo is still up, you can check out for free if you vibe with it. * * * If you like chill and story-driven games, check out my curator [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35872486]Peaceful Adventures and Stories[/url]. You're also welcome to join the [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/chilladventures]group[/url].