Yon Paradox Reviews

I've played this for almost an hour, and right off the bat I can say that there's some serious issues. The graphics are very low-resolution, so it's a bit grating to look at after a while. Aside from that, I actually quite like the aesthetics. Main issue is that you can't see yourself in a past iteration, and clones spawn every few minutes, so you have to plan your route. Problem is, there's many long steatches of hallway and no way to peek around corners, so you'll need to have very precise timing to not fail. ...Aaaand you start at the beginning every time. No checkpoints between any of the 5(?) rooms. Completely restart. I can't even make it past the second room because it's a massive maze that involves backtracking and every time my player is in just the wrong spot. So! We have a good (if overused) little concept, but the lack of checkpoints and no system for detecting a previous clone nearby make this one a no-go unless you really want to plan out a whole route on paper or something through trial and error.

This is one of the only video games that I actually [i]hate.[/i] Most games have something that I enjoy, and even if I stop playing them, it's due to distraction or premature boredom. Yon Paradox has a game design that I fundamentally despise. There are probably other puzzle games like this, but this is the first one I've played. The idea of making a video game where the purpose is to run around areas, solve puzzles, and also avoid entering the path of versions of yourself that are automatically created at time intervals.... it's disgusting to me. Not being seen by a clone as I try to do puzzles is such a lame challenge to me. And the fact that being seen has a narrow window of getting out of view before the entire run is reset to the beginning... is disgusting to me. I simply hate the design of this game. Maybe it's not fair for me to negatively review a game I don't like at that basic of a level, but I do generally love puzzle games and this is a puzzle game. Nobody has left a Steam review in the past year, so I'm going to do it. This game is whacked out.

This game is interesting in concept, somewhat fun to play, and brief, but unfortunately it doesn't quite behave that well, which made it hard to enjoy. In my own session, trying to interact with objects in certain puzzles caused them to seize around randomly or outright not follow the cursor, making them difficult, if not impossible to maneuver into specific locations. Most notably a tangram puzzle, and one involving dragging orbs along lines to highlight nodes, and boxes being picked up that would periodically fall from my grasp. Something that made the issue worse, was that every ten seconds or so, my view would instantly rotate about 45 degrees to the left or right, depending on what direction I'd most recently moved my mouse, causing me to become quite disoriented, especilly while navigating around in rooms or passageways with flat coloration making it hard to discern what direction I'd just come from or was going. Finally, after completing what seemed to be the win condition of the game by collecting all available pieces and [spoiler]placing all three colored boxes onto their approprate platforms in the blue room, releasing a purple gear (which could not be picked up) and activating a portal, which sent me to the start of the level with the game still running and all other rooms being shown as complete[/spoiler], nothing else happened and I was left wandering through the completed rooms. With more well-behaved physics interactions, some kind of fix for the view shifting issue, and a win condition (or more likely whatever I had missed just being a bit more visible) then this game would definitely be recommendable.

At first I thought this would be a quick and easy puzzle game, but from the very start the game opens up to be so much more. You are essentially Marty McFly running around an arena solving puzzles, where every 120 seconds another McFly spawns where you started. He is you from the past, and will eventually catch up to you if you're not careful. As you go about solving puzzles unlocking access to other parts of the arena, you must avoid having any of your past selves see you in the future, since this is a time paradox. The game offers fun and engaging puzzles, some of which are randomized while others stay the same and quickly become repetitive each time you play. However, the $3 game does offer varying difficulty levels that shorten the time in which your past clones are created. To those who have beaten impossible mode, I salute you. In the end, this game may not be for everyone. I didn't get the chance to experience it through VR, but I had no problems making my way around the corridors or solving the puzzles. There are rare glitches that cause items to become floaty, but nothing that affects gameplay. If you think the concept sounds cool and don't mind trying over and over to fix your mistakes, definitely pick this game up. I had a blast finding all the routes I could, beating my previous times, and even making it out of the green zone is rewarding enough...

This game has an interesting concept and can be fun but is not a good VR game, its a monitor game with VR tacked on IMO and because I bought it for VR (hell, its part of the indie VR bundle) it gets a thumbs down unfortunately. If you're buying it for a monitor dont let me discourage you but if you're buying for VR, think twice about it.

Fun concept and unique design, but I cannot advocate for a game that reverts us back to the days of NES with repeating 100% of progress after failure--especially when failure is so likely. Looks way better in a 3D headset, but be prepared for motion sickness if you do. Controls in VR are also a bit wonky with pieces not quite going where you want (could REALLY use some tracking controllers to fix that), and the crosshair stuck in your face the whole time is annnoying.

It requires too much trial and error method to solving the puzzles, and failure resets the entire game. The first zone was fine, the third or fourth puzzle was to hold a button, the only cool instance of using the clone to solve a puzzle. [b]The second zone was a giant maze,[/b] it takes forever to go anywhere IF you know where you are going, so you hold shift to run, making deadly clones running amok in a maze while you are lost in it. You don't lose instantly if a clone just glances at you but in this maze unless you play ultra slow to give yourself a room to run the other direction there is absolutely no way to properly solve it. I just flipped the table and uninstalled. There was some major lag spikes in the maze, I imagine this could be a problem for those playing in VR. If they made that a paradox only undone the last loop, as in every time loop was a checkpoint, it could be a very awesome puzzle game. But no, it plays like a roguelite starting from scratch on a single mistake, as in the case of the maze, a mistake that you hardly prevent without serious trial and error memorization.

I love the concept behind this game, and I personally found the artwork quite appealing. Don't have a VR headset myself yet, unfortunately, so I stuck with monitor play, but still found it engaging. The (almost) "insta-death" mechanic irked me slightly early on, but since this is evidently a shorter game, I think it's more than acceptable. I found the puzzles enjoyable and adequately mind-bending for my own tastes, and I like the added element of tension the game throws at you with its time paradox mechanic. I'd definitely deem this game worth the 3 dollar price tag. EDIT: A negative I've found while playing the game is a small glitch (or what I assume to be a glitch) that causes your position and/or camera to jitter slightly, reorienting you with no apparent reasoning. It's hardly game-breaking, but it can be jarring and detract from the overall experience.

I saw this game thinking something along the lines of "It's a cheap puzzle game, maybe I can waste a little bit of time before I get tired of it." So I picked it up, not thinking too much of it. I was thinking to my self, "how hard can it really be to avoid your past self while solving puzzles? What could they possibly throw at me?" This isn't a long game, which is nice considering the "perma-death" aspect. I beat the Normal mode in about 16:10 on my third or fourth run through, first time recording it. I actually really enjoyed playing through it and having to solve the puzzles on a clock. Most of the time I look at timed puzzles and am dissappointed, but these were different. They were easy enough to not take long, but hard enough that I actually had to put some thought into them. Pretty decent design. One of my first thoughts while playing this was "hey, this might be a good game to speedrun.." It incentivises it, actually. The faster you can get through the puzzles, the better. I personally plan to speedrun it, and I hope others do as well. All that said, the game has a few issues with it. None really game breaking, but just inconvenient. The physics can be a bit slow and unresponsive, I've gotten stuck between a litteral rock and a hard place, and the camera would randomly jump to a different direction. There's probably a few other minor things I've yet to run into, but those were the most major. If the game were to have a bit more polish, fixing the physics and camera issues, it'd immediately be significantly better in my eyes. I'd love if the developers could go back over and just clean it up a bit, put a little bit of effort into a better play experience. That would be amazing, especially since this game supports VR and those who use it would benefit even more than I.

The main conceit of Yon Paradox is that if a past iteration of yourself sees the current version of you, you create a paradox, which means you lose and have to start over. It's a creative and thematic idea. Unfortunately, it's not so great for puzzle gameplay. Normally step 1 in solving a puzzle is examining all the parts of the puzzle so you understand the rules and can formulate a solution. If you do that here, you've just nuked the entire level and left your next iteration no safe place to stand. I don't see how you're supposed to do anything without intentionally wasting your first try on scouting and then starting over--which might be OK, except that you don't just restart the current puzzle, you go ALL the way back to the beginning. To make matters worse, the boundary where you trigger a paradox is unforgiving and unclear: the "sight" range of your past self doesn't seem to correspond exactly to what you actually saw while playing them, and there is no visual aid for your future self to see where is safe to be or warning when you start to get close. You can be standing somewhere that seems safe and then just suddenly die. This takes a difficult mechanic and greatly ramps up the frustration for no apparent reason. And--at least near the start of the game, where I played--the puzzles you're asked to solve do not inspire much hope for clever level design. Towers of hanoi? Jigsaw puzzles? Maybe these are just intended to teach you the UI, but if so, asking the player to redo them on every death is pretty dumb. Finally, the game lacks pretty basic options. You can't rebind the controls or change mouse sensitivity. Tedium from waiting for the next time warp could have been greatly reduced by including a simple "fast foward" button, but I couldn't find one.