EZRA: The Stranger Reviews

https://youtu.be/zwmNBfRmkEg During my First Impressions video I was about to give this game a good review rating as the gameplay was smooth and polished, with decent graphics and no framerate drops or stutters. The game's controls are exceptionally basic, definitely earning it the casual tag. The puzzles themselves also off absoutely no challenge whatsoever outside of timing. In addition to that, the "Story Telling Comics" That the game purports to have is around 30 seconds at the beginning of the game and that is it. And while I had no appreciation for any of this, I could still consider it to be passable for the casual scene were it not for what I discovered after an hour of slow, methodical gameplay for the purposes of my review. I found out that the game ended after that first hour. And, that was only because of the speed to which I was playing. Had I not taken my time, I could have finished the game in 45 minutes or less which, at a whopping $10 for less than an hour of gameplay!?!?! The Devs should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for attempting to gouge the consumer to such a ridiculous extent. With absolutely no replay factor and the exceptionally basic difficulty that would provide a challenge only to the very drunk, coupled with the insultingly short play length, Ezra: The Stranger is a waste of time and money by every definition. Avoid this game until it decreases in price or there is a MASSIVE sale!

Ezra The Stranger is the indie developer Foremost Games’ first release! And you can tell! It’s a 2D platformer in the style of Limbo and Inside. Now I say in the style of because in reality it’s a near total rip-off. The visual style is almost identical with a silhouette foreground and character with more detailed backgrounds to show off the kind of area you’re in. other than the backgrounds having more colour which actually look a bit out of place they’re basically the same thing. The platforming is very simplistic, the controls are also very simple but somehow painful to use. Ezra will often drop off ropes or ladders for no reason or even miss grabbing them at all. Ledges never seem to have any indication that it can be grabbed and your jumps will often fall short even though you still manage to grab the ledge. This makes timed puzzles really frustrating because you have no concept of distance. On the plus side it’s not particularly buggy I did get caught on a dropping wall which stopped me going through even though it shouldn’t but otherwise nothing major. If you want to see the video review with some gameplay in the background it's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG3291SutFU