TRI: Of Friendship and Madness Reviews

In my opinion, go play He Who Watches demo instead, it's basically what I wanted to get out of this game but didn't quite get and I'm really looking forward to the full game release.

Another case in which I wish Steam reviews had a "Maybe" option. For the first 13 levels out of 16, the game is very good: the simple tools at your disposal and simple level design combine in a surprisingly elegant way to generally allow for creative solutions, and the meat of the challenge is relegated to reaching optional collectibles while simply reaching the exit is a much more straightforward affair. However, there is a tremendous drop in quality in the last three levels, each of them introducing incredibly finnicky and unfun puzzles while also making them mandatory to progress: in particular, level 15 ends with such an obscenely time-consuming and frustrating mess it alone convinced me to switch this review from "Recommend" to "Do not recommend". These new puzzles also exacerbate issues with the control system that simply weren't noticeable with simpler and more robust puzzles: placing a triangle a few degrees off isn't a big deal when it's just going to act as a platform for you to climb, but it's tremendously inconvenient when it's one out of the dozen mirrors you need to bounce a light ray across a very precise path (and don't even get me started on kamis, FUCK kamis). What really pisses me off is that those last levels also had some great ideas ([spoiler] teleporter cube in level 14, the super-secret puzzle limiting you to 2 triangles at a time in level 15, using triangles as fox bait in level 16 [/spoiler]), but you won't ever see any of that unless you're willing to spend LITERAL HOURS on the shit puzzles.

This is one of the worst-designed puzzle games I’ve ever played. The mechanics are incredibly finicky, and the overall design feels clunky and frustrating. What should have been an engaging experience turned into a chore just to get through each level. While I can see glimpses of interesting ideas beneath the surface, the execution is extremely poor. It’s hard to enjoy a puzzle game when the core mechanics work against the player more than the puzzles themselves.

This is a puzzle game like no other. I play a lot of first person puzzle games and I’ve encountered no game to compare this game with. Its core puzzle mechanics are unique. The implementation of these core puzzle mechanics are well done. The level design is very creative and every level is significantly different than the previous one. The levels are quite large also. All in all this is a good game and certainly worth playing if you like an original puzzle game. But there is one word of caution and that is that this game is very long and you are probably going to get stuck many times not knowing how to proceed. It took me a long time to get far into the game. So long that I actually stopped playing the game at one point. I only picked it up many months later and then spent many hours finishing the game. I’m glad I finished the game but boy did it take a lot of effort. I got stuck many times which is one of the reasons it took so long. But in the end I only used outside help twice to be able to proceed. You need a lot of patience and experimentation to finish this game. From the steam achievements I know that only 6.3% of players finished the game. Is it a good puzzle game? Absolutely! But I do have a bit of a love / hate relationship with it.

I'm not sure where I got this game from, as I have no memory of purchasing it, but I'm a pretty big fan of first-person puzzle games, so I still had fairly high hopes for this game. Unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy my time with this game, and was left disappointed by the fairly lackluster story and the tedious and repetitive mechanics. This game starts by telling you that there are two fox gods, one is missing, and you're supposed to find them. Unfortunately, the game never gives you a reason to be invested in finding this fox, as the game tells you almost nothing about them. Should I be invested in saving this fox because it's a good creature? Is there some sort of negative consequence if the fox is never found? The game never elaborates (at least, not in the earlier part of the game). This makes the story feel pretty meaningless, and I was never able to get invested in it. I was hoping the gameplay would make up for the disappointing narrative, but unfortunately the mechanics were pretty unsatisfying as well. The basic premise is fairly simple, and involves placing triangles throughout each level to try and reach three fox statutes that you need to reach the next level. There's also lots of smaller statues you can collect, although those aren't required. The puzzle design in most levels is pretty simple, so this made it often feel more like a collectathon than a puzzle game. This mechanic also feel a bit clunky sometimes, and the choice to use triangles instead of rectangles seems a bit arbitrary and unnecessary, but it works fine for the most part. Unfortunately, the game seems to struggle to find new and interesting ways to get you to use this mechanic that aren't frustrating and tedious, so not only does placing triangles get repetitive pretty quickly, it also gets frustrating as the game starts limiting where you can place them and sometimes forces you to place triangle after triangle to scale massive obstacles. There are some new mechanics that you unlock after a while which add some variation, but I didn't find that they added a whole lot, and after a while I just got tired of doing the same thing over and over, and called it quits. The game seems to run well, and it looks nice, with a fairly unique art style. I didn't encounter any bugs either, other than some occasional jank with the triangles. [b]TL;DR[/b] Although I normally enjoy first-person puzzle games, and this game runs well and has a nice art style, it has a disappointing story, the mechanics are repetitive and tedious, and it often feels more like a collectathon than a puzzle game. As such, I can't recommend it.