Return to Grace Reviews

This is a interesting thought provoking game about AI with lovely graphics and some easier puzzles. I personally enjoyed it very much, I wish it was longer but I will probably play again and make different choices as the achievements are there for that option.

Return to Grace is a sci-fi exploratory adventure in which you land on a strange planet in search of a lost AI named Grace. Your first task is to locate the source of her signal and then explore an abandoned settlement to understand what occurred and to locate and activate the missing AI. The settlement is large, with multiple areas to traverse and rooms to discover. There are very simple puzzles along the way. You are joined by a set of AIs who guide you: Control, Logic, Empathy, and combinations thereof. You discover the story of the settlement by examining artifacts and listening to recordings. All, in all, a great story with interesting scenery and quality voice acting. About half the achievements are story-related and the others are easily missed. There is a decision point early in the game which controls which ending you will experience. There are three endings, only two of which have related achievements. Since some achievements are mutually exclusive, a bit of replay is required. The developers have made this easy. Within the menu, you can copy a save file to another slot. If you do this correctly, you can get all achievements by playing through one-and-a-half times. Your path is fairly linear and actions like ‘climb’ or ‘jump’ are automatically accomplished by a single action command. Thus, no platforming is required and the only places where falling is possible are accompanied by quick recovery paths. For me, playing with a controller was much smoother than using the keyboard and mouse. You cannot skip past dialog, and the action command is not enabled while any character is speaking. This can be a bit frustrating, as you will be regularly waiting for conversation to end so you can push a button and move on. I thoroughly enjoyed Return to Grace and highly recommend it. It is a relaxing and easy game with a good story and clever dialog.

A short, engaging game about a space explorer called Adie who crash lands onto the planet Ganymede in the year 3000. She is searching for an AI called Grace who was once the caretaker of the solar system and suddenly shut down over 1000 years ago. This is on the store page. Return to Grace is more like a walking sim/Visual Novel style of game as it is dialogue heavy. Very little action apart from easy puzzles. This is definitely not like The Turing Test!! The highlights of this game are the graphics which are stunning at times and the interesting story of Adie's exploration of Ganymede. The dialogue is top notch with excellent voice actors adding depth to the story. Adie finds that components of Grace's AI are still active and she has to build a relationship with all of them to reach her goal. It was amusing listening to different AI personalities bickering amongst themselves or having a sarcastic shot at her intelligence!! I was often chuckling at their dialogue. I played through the game twice as there are 3 possible endings and still didn't pick up all the achievements. The game discusses the relationship between AI and humans and some decisions have to be made throughout the game which affects your ending. It was never boring and I was totally engrossed with the storyline. If you enjoy sci-fi walking sims with an interesting story, this is for you. If you're looking for hard puzzles or action, look elsewhere. Buy on sale due its short length. 8/10