The Eyes of Ara Reviews

I'm a lifelong adventure player. I started with Colossal Cave on an IBM 370 in 1978, and have always favored adventure games. I am dogged and persistent, but I'm uninstalling Eyes of Ara without finishing it. I ended up locked in the water channel room with the concentric rings puzzle. After fiddling with it for over an hour (maybe several hours - I lost track), I looked up hints, but the hints said that I was just going to have to fiddle with it until I got it (a mathematician gave a helpful "bump", but even he said that you just have to keep fiddling with it). It used to be that lazy adventure designers would put a "slider" puzzle or a maze in the game. Nowadays, the lazy puzzle design is the "interlocked pieces" puzzle. The concentric rings puzzle could only be logically solved by an advanced mathematician. A savant could crack it intuitively, but if your not an advanced mathematician or a savant, you're stuck with fiddling it for hours. Not fun! Eyes of Ara has pretty good ambiance, decent graphics (I ended up turning brightness and gamma all the way up), and good/very good game controls and dynamics. The storyline is "Meh" - okay, but not compelling. But being locked in a room with a puzzle that requires hours of grinding? It's just not worth the effort. Edit: Steam says that my play time was 3.6 hours, but the game itself says over 17 hours.

A fun point and click, find-the-pixel puzzle game. Not quite on par with The Room series, but interesting and challenging puzzles and decent game length. Finding objects can be very hard because you have to search from fixed viewpoints unlike games with free movement where you can walk up and get closer. The environments are also very cluttered but most things are just part of the scenery, which makes it harder to find obscure things like loose bricks. This game has a LOT of puzzles where you have to align photos, numbers, etc. and when you click/rotate one thing, 2 others move at once. Drove me nuts. For the life of me, I could not figure out what the symbols did on the planetarium. I was able to solve all of the puzzles by making educated guesses. The epilogue puzzle on the rooftop is infuriating because the programmers used an obscure math system that few people--other than programmers--would know. As a rule of thumb, you should be able to solve puzzle games without requiring outside knowledge. But despite these nits, it was fun to play and I'd recommend it.

Pretty sad about this one. It starts off promising, but the vast, vast, VAST majority of challenge in this game comes from pixel hunting essential puzzle pieces in dark/muddy looking environments. Once you actually have all the pieces, the solution is (most of the time) obvious. You'll spend 70-80% of your playtime wracking your brain trying to figure something out, only to realize that you just don't have a vital part of the solution, and it really galls after a while. Just a tip for any passing puzzle game devs, because it seems at least one of them needs reminding: a puzzle is meant to be a logic challenge. It is a scenario set up specifically to test your ability to intuit a path toward an end goal. That end goal MUST be made clear to the player, because if they don't understand what they're meant to be achieving, then they won't be able to engage with the challenge properly. A proper, well designed puzzle will provide the player with both a clear picture of what the end goal is, and provide them ALL the pieces needed to get there. The challenge must come from putting the pieces together in the correct way. The challenge must absolutely NOT come from running through a castle, clicking on every single pixel trying to find the pieces that the game has hidden from you. Sudoku works as a puzzle because you start by knowing the pieces (the digits 1-9), and the solution (a filled grid with no repeats in rows, columns, or boxes). The challenge of sudoku lies in figuring out the configuration of the pieces, as it should with any well-designed puzzle. This game just fails to structure it's 'puzzles' properly. It presents you with a round peg and a round hole, but it hides the peg behind a loose brick in a hallway wall hidden behind a wardrobe inside of a caged-off room. Putting the pieces together is a no-brainer, it's finding the damned things is what will take mental toll on you.