Golem Reviews

I wanted to like this game--it's a cute little puzzler, and it has some fun elements. But, oh, the controls. The hardest thing about the game wasn't the puzzles at all--it was getting the dang camera to move when you wanted, or getting the characters to go where you wanted them to go. Moving around was painstaking. And THE ROCKS. Some puzzles involve meticulously moving rocks from point A to point B. Fine, if the rocks would stop dropping or spinning for no reason. The vast majority of puzzles simply involved getting characters to the right places. Even with the space "fast forward," moving characters around was very. slow. The story is pretty insubstantial (arrive at place. get machine to work. go to new place). It's a shame, because this game has a cute concept, and the puzzles could be fun and challenging at times. However, my frustration at the bouncing camera and too-sensitive controls overpowered my enjoyment of the game.

I loved this game. I didn't really find the camera annoying at all. It took me very little time to get used to the controls so I had no problem playing it. For me, the best thing about Golem is the puzzle and level design which I thought was very innovative as it makes you think about which path to take and how to use both characters to progress. The graphics and music were also really good and perfectly suited to the atmosphere of the game. My only issue was that one of the achievements didn't unlock for me even though I'm sure it should have. But I wasn't too bothered about completing all of them (as it looks like one is permanently broken anyway).

I really enjoyed this game - I like these sort of 3D spatial awareness puzzlers - and this one had a great sense of style and place. It was pretty chilled out to play as well, no pressure, light soundtrack, interesting visuals and flowing stages. I had to restart levels a couple of times when I ended up getting stuck but they can all be worked out through experimentation and logic. The level animations were great and the golem was able to display personality in all its forms. A rare review and a thumbs up from me.

This was pretty disappointing for me, the puzzles are fairly obtuse and involve lots of backtracking... + Concept is cool, exploring ruins with your golem +- Graphics are ok, looks like a mobile game - Controls are annoying, zoom in and zoom out repeatedly, always need to hold down space to speed up your character - Some levels like "Power" have you rotate the entire puzzle, so you're repeatedly pulling levers and flip flopping to see if you did it right, it tests your patience - Achievements are janked, there are one or two you can't get and won't ever be fixed

Bit of a bummer this....Golem is precisely the sort of game I typically love (no pressure puzzle solving), but between the obtuse camera angles (thankfully you can adjust the camera with WASD and the mouse wheel to zoom in or out, but still.....the camera and how it affects your ability to click on targets is your enemy more often than not), some graphical glitches/bugs, and the increasingly convoluted puzzles, and a broken achievement, which the devs can't be arsed to address/fix, ultimately means I can't recommend this game. Obviously, how complicated a puzzle is remains a subjective thing, but if you not only have multiple moving parts that need to be activated, in the right order, added to the fact that you can sometimes be trapped halfway through a twenty/thirty minute level if you guess the wrong lever to pull next....well that's just frustrating. Because then you'd better hope you saved recently (ideally before you made the error, not after you've taken the action and had to progress a little further before you realize you've screwed yourself) or you will be forced to start the whole level over from scratch. And there is almost NEVER any clear indication of what the various levers etc will do until you've pulled them, possibly setting yourself up for failure via trial and error. This makes for a frustrating puzzle game, to be sure! And the bugs/glitches.....several times I reloaded a saved game and found the character suspended in the air as if she was climbing a vine, whereas she had in fact been saved handling a lever, and she simply could not be retrieved from that position. Not to mention that sometimes a platform with both the protagonist and her golem would move, but the golem would remain suspended in air as the platform moved on with only the protagonist on it, forcing you to go back and try again (and again, and again) until the golem sticks the landing (as it were). So, ultimately, I cannot recommend the game, unless it's on a DEEEEEP sale (as I said, the devs can't even be bothered to fix a broken achievment, so the only people with 100% are no doubt SAM users....) Cheers, Colin

Puzzle point-and-click game, despite what you might think this combo works quite nicely. Managed to finish in about 4 hours without any great difficulty. Almost all the ideas here are extremely well thought out, and as such most puzzles are very satisfying to overcome. However, lack of polish on a couple of mid-to-late levels meant the solutions were sometimes a little more frustrating than they could have been. A particular gripe on the last level required me to restart the entire level to correct my mistake. The camera also becomes the surprise antagonist by the end, and some minor keyboard gymnastics were needed to keep the camera from driving me completely mad. Still very happy with time and money spent on this game, and hope this encourages Longbow Games to try their hand at this style more often, though perhaps with a bit more polish next time!

Great music, pretty artwork, interesting theme. Unfortunately the control mechanic feels horrid to me, bounced right off the gameplay because of that. It didn't help that the game crashed and doesn't autosave, so all progress was lost. The camera has a mind of its own and progress feels cumbersome. You may enjoy the aesthetic, but the gameplay and control lets it down.

Could be a nice and easy and relaxing game, if it wasn't for the camera. How it tends to center on the player is at first simply annoying, but graduates to outright detestable in second half when the game gets more "physical". With how one finds oneself juggling keyboard and mouse, the whole thing is almost reduced to an arcade genre, and not in a good way.

Before I get into the bad stuff, I'll start off by saying this: It's truly a beautiful game with high potential. The puzzles are over-all interesting though not extremely challenging. On to the bad stuff. The hardest part about this game isn't the puzzles themselves. It's when there's no clear indication of what to do, or the camera. The camera controls in general are rather bad. You control it with 'ASDW' but the problem is that it has a tendency to sweep towards the character you're controlling while zooming in to a set FOV. This means that when you're using features that require you to see beyond that small window, the camera will constantly automatically pull away from what you're doing. This forced me to start over what I was doing several times during my playthrough. Then there're the actual character controls. They're honestly not much better, even though they're just you clicking at a spot you want the selected character to go to. It works fine while walking over 'normal' obstacles, but I've noticed that this function can only interact with climbable objects(like ropes) once per click. This means that if you want to walk some distance, climb a rope, and then jump off on a platform, you'll have to choose. Either you walk to the rope and grab it in the first click, and climb it and jump off with the second click, or you walk to it and climb it in the first click and jump off on the second. If it's just walking or going through doorways, you can go as far and go through as many doorways as neccessary for the character to get where you want it in a single click. This does not mean that you can't make characters pathfind through climbing. Later on in the game, [spoiler]when the golem turns into a monkey, you can call it to the girl. [/spoiler] This working despite all obstacles proves that it's most likely a bug, an obvious one they somehow didn't catch before releasing. The cutscenes are snapshot-images. While some do have movement, it's mostly minimal. Furthermore, in my case, the images weren't rendering propperly, resulting in the blurred graphics you'd expect from a game on one of the older consoles, not a game whose selling point is atleast partially the graphics/beautiful environment. Finally, the ending. [spoiler] It was honestly one of the more disappointing points for me. Firstly, the tower you've been starting up to get water with relies on sunlight, yet all of a sudden in the end cutscene, it starts raining as the steam condensates into raindrops. The thing is, it's still sunny outside. Meaning that, for some reason, the builders decided that after filtering, purifying and boiling the water, the best method to send it out into the aqueducts was to let it rain through the tower's insides, presumably to be collected further down. Then there's a slight problem revealed. Just before the water from the tower reaches the girl's village, it spills out due to one of the arches being broken, something that's apparently not only a great surprise to the girl, it also apparently nulls the effort they've put in so far. Because there's apparently no way the villages who've been suffering from drought all this time could just collect it from the veritable LAKE that logically should be forming right next to their huts. The golem's final form, a humanoid, has gained the power to levitate objects. You've used it numerous times to move objects(duh) and even build simple bridges. Thus, the golem's reaction is to use the very same power to put the broken arch back together, despite it being far FAR out of any previously indicated range. This, however, seemingly kills the golem. Rather unnecessarily so aswell. [/spoiler] There are several rather obvious indications of sequels in the form them hinting that atleast two more towers existing that are related to the tower the storyline takes place in. If so, then I hope they atleast patch this game first, because as I've mentioned, it HAS potential. It just isn't leveraged yet. It's furthermore rather short. I got through it in just past 1.5h and I spent some time walking back and forth because I didn't have any idea as to what I was doing. In a second playthrough you could most likely get through it in less that an hour. As such, I'd say that it's not worth its price. I'd be hesitant to recommend buying it in its current state even for 5€, much less the current full price of 15. EDIT: One point I forgot to mention is the sound. The music cuts oddly when the golem 'evolves', some things make an aweful amount of racket, such as the golem walking up and down stairs, and some things lack sound for no obvious reason, such as object collision.

Bought the game on day 1. I was expecting a puzzle platformer, but really it's more of a puzzle point and click. Not a bad thing at all, but the descrip[tion doesn't really reflect that. I've only played through part of it so far, so I can only judge from what I've experienced. I like the way it looks, the art direction and the music. It has a relaxing atmosphere to it. Puzzles so far aren't extremely challenging, but I enjoy the mechanics of them, or at least the concept of the mechanics. The implementation is a little hit or miss at times I feel, especially when you get to the point when you can control the golem independently fromthe main character. I absolutely HATE the camera though, more particularly how it automatically recenters on the main character. It's actually most annoying as you're trying to get a wide view of the level you're in and trying to decide your next moves. In my opinion, the camera should be fixed and moved only by the player as s/he intends to, and maybe give an extra option to recenter if desired (like right click or something). Aside from the frustrating camera and sometimes awkward ways of controlling the golem, it's a very interesting game. It's too early for me to tell if it's worth the price, but I don't regret my purchase.