Djinn - The Forbidden Knowledge Reviews

this game provides you with 0 direction or insight, the only way to learn is trial an error. they frequently give you long notes to read, but they don't help you outside of the first note which dumps a ton of game mechanics on you that will leave your mind as soon as you close the note (it's overwhelming). after spending hours, I've learned that even when you know what's happening, the map is very empty and you can get killed randomly by spiders you can't see and can't hit with your sword or bees that you can get teleported onto. I found 1 objective, the hospital key and the ruby, by sheer accident: the djinn teleported me to the key's building and I managed to get it before dying. could not find anything on my own because every building I searched had useless resources I didn't need like more matches, or just contained nothing. on some occasions, at full sanity, something would just kill me, like a mask with a floating sword just spawning in front of me or one time I walked into a circle and suddenly saw a scythe blade around my neck for half a second before back to main menu... also you are constantly losing resources: if you do not have your lamp lit, you lose sanity, but if you have your lamp lit, you lose lamp oil; your health just slowly constantly drains. you dont find enough potions to not worry about it, also the instant kills can just get you anyways if you wander into the wrong random building. the good news is permanent objectives are kept on death, so I guess technically this is a rogue-lite as it has meta progression, but as mentioned previously, there's no direction given to the player, so I don't know what to do with the 6 gems should I acquire them all. also the level design just seems really poor: your lamp is randomized in the first house, so it could be by the door or it could be in the basement or elsewhere. you have multiple paths to take at all times, but so many of these are just red herrings that lead nowhere, ladders and planks that go to rooftops and walls, but with nothing up there and a risk going down. few buildings stick out and most that do are very far away. randomly my character get scarred like a cat, literally you jump up into the air, frequently when climbing other things, killing you. one time the game forcibly turned my camera 45 degrees to the left when I was on a wall, killing me. so on top of trying to navigate an empty world with no real level flow or map elements guiding you towards anything, you can get killed randomly by scare elements, damaged or killed by planks breaking, damaged by hard to see spiders, killed by character forced jumping or forced camera look, and also random things that just pop up and instant kill you at full health. this experience was deeply confusing, often frustrating, if not for how ridiculous it was, I would have quit sooner, I was entertained mostly by how confused I was. the trailer made it look like there would be combat, platforming, and puzzles, but these are all so few and far between it's almost false advertising, just heavily misleading.