ZED Reviews

First of all, this isn't a puzzle game. I know it was promised to be one, and it's unfortunate that it turned out the way it is. This game is much closer to Gone Home or Dear Esther than anything else. With that said, I think the story is a pretty good one. I found it to have a pretty powerful and satisfying ending. On top of that, it's a very pretty game. If you go into this with the right mindset, you'll get 2-4 hours of heartwarming art with a heartwarming ending. If that's what you're looking for, you'll like this game.

Sadly, this ended in my first refund. I had high hopes when I saw this was published by Cyan, but sadly the time came for my first ever refund. Please notice that I absolutely love the sound, writing, and general feel, this is absolutely not meant in a bashing way, but as a 3D artist myself... Minutes into the game I was not able to ignore all the texturing issues anymore. There is so much UWV stretching going on, lightbleeding through certain walls, and some walls not even properly snapped to the floor mesh in some areas, allowing the player to look through the entire worldspace, which is rather immersion breaking. It just feels so rushed. The grunge decal is used so often and in so many places, art fatigue hits quickly, in some places it's clearly hitting the other side of the tileset and it results in a very man-made grunge splatter ( especially in the sewer tileset intersections) Some areas look better, but after ignoring some of the messy texturing work, gaps in walls in the first areas, the sewer sadly did it for me and I had to quit. Some examples which caught my eye at first glance : https://imgur.com/a/d15BXGx Now because the game does really feel good, is very smooth and the writing seems awesome, others may completely ignore all the above, which is good! I personally was just turned off by it. So, if you don't mind all of the above, go ahead and try the game! :)

[h1]Experienced on the Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality. VR Review Only.[/h1] You can view my quick review & gameplay here: https://youtu.be/AvWseE8xQ6o This is not a full review. It is possible that the devs will fix this game in the future and that the story gets a lot better after I quit playing and refunded the game. However, currently the game is broken on VR. After each loading screen, and there are several, the game stops rendering to your VR headset. This problem was reported to the devs back in February. I had to refund because of this issue. Also, the core gameplay loop is just boring. You object hunt through each level until you find all the items. You listen to audio tidbits. After you find all the hidden objects, a puzzle opens up. You solve the simple tile logic puzzle and the door opens to a loading screen. This happened on every level, except for those that just have dialogue ... so you just wait for them to stop talking before a door opens and then you get another loading screen. I don't like to refund games, but I decided to refund this one. It just doesn't work on VR. They did add full locomotion and there is snap turning. However, locomotion, whether teleportation or full locomotion is bad and you do drift suddenly left or right (or up or down) using either method. With full locomotion there are pathing issues and the default walking speed is too slow. With teleportation locomotion, the teleport marker is inconsistent, so you have to consistently try more than once to teleport. The set environmental pieces are nice & imaginative. However, you cannot interact with most objects. The few interactions you do have, are with your laser pointer where you point and click on some objects. Even then, the payoff from the interaction is hardly worth it. Lastly, while the visuals are okay overall .... the lighting and textures are poor in some areas. [b]Rate 3.5/10. I mean it's totally broken in VR. However, there may be a good story here. Some people apparently liked it enough to write a positive review. [/b]

ZED was... fine. A pretty game, with nice sound... but I didn't have fun. I played through the game in just under 2 hours, really just looking around, but it was very shallow in it's game play. The same "puzzle" over and over again inside of a linear track with narration in the background, some nice music, and a short story... I love Cyan and all of it's games, but this... was just disappointing. I wanted to like it, but I didn't enjoy it at all... and I hate that.

Zed is a game that I was very excited to play. From what I had seen before i bought it I was hyped for it. I went in with very high hopes for the story and voice acting. I was not disappointed, the entire time I was playing I was intrigued and wanted to play more. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in a good story, amazing voice acting and puzzles.

[h1]The Short Of It[/h1] [i]Zed[/i] is a heartfelt story told gradually over the course of a walk through the surreal representations of an old man's mind. I place it among other narrative "walkers" such as [i]Dear Esther[/i], [i]The Stanley Parable[/i], and [i]The Beginner's Guide[/i]. If you cried during the first 20 minutes of 'Up,' expect [i]Zed[/i] to tug pretty hard at your heartstrings. It suffers a bit from some repetitive pacing, and don't expect any puzzles or gameplay elements of consequence. [h1]The Long Of It[/h1] Even though I personally give it a thumbs up, I can understand why a lot of folks gave [i]Zed[/i] a negative review. It's not advertised as a "puzzle game" per-se, but upon first glance it does give the expectation that it would be more interactive than it ultimately is. All you're able to do is walk around and click on things to progress and unlock new dialogue and text. It also has several repeated environments where you sit twiddling your thumbs in order to give the narration time to do its thing. I love a well-told story in a virtual world that takes its time, but even [u]I[/u] got a bit impatient. Where [i]Zed[/i] shines is in how it allows the story to unfold to the viewer naturally. It does this through the use of highly charming hand-drawn art, creative writing, environment design, and voice acting. It's an emotionally challenging story, and one that is highly relatable to those with creative mindsets or who've experienced troubled childhoods (or adulthoods!) Nothing is explicitly spelled out to the viewer, which makes the gradual revelation of the narrative's conclusion all the more satisfying. My eyes definitely moistened at [spoiler]the completed book for Charlotte[/spoiler] at the end. Incredibly sweet, and nicely done. I can't go as far as to say that [i]Zed[/i] is "great," because I feel that it has some notable shortcomings: [list] [*]Despite using a more modern game engine, it's not nearly as visually compelling as some older games like [i]Dear Esther[/i]. [*]Despite being produced by some of the team from Cyan, it doesn't have any actual "game" to it, and contains no more "puzzle solving" than reading a short story does. [*]The game is short, but would be even shorter if you weren't required to walk through all of the environments to locate the arbitrary things to click, making it feel overall like there's a decided lack of substance to it. [/list] "Walking narratives" like [i]Dear Esther[/i] work so well because the slow pacing is paired with stunning environments that are new and fresh at every turn. [i]Zed[/i] feels like the creators were aiming for that sort of experience, but the use of small, repeated identical spaces paired with simplistic props doesn't do nearly as good of a job keeping the player's sense of wonder alive during their mandatory march through the narration. As a result, there was a strong degree of "Can we get on with it please?" that crept into my mind. Beefs aside, I appreciated that [i]Zed[/i] was daring enough to tell a story about how people are messy, and that coping with difficult family environments leaves a mark on multiple generations. It does this while also addressing the challenges of being "blessed" with a creative mind, and tying it all up nicely in a legitimately adorable children's book that I would have loved to have read to my kids. You'll probably utter a genuine, non-cynical "wow that was really sweet" as the credits roll, just before you uninstall it to save disk space. And don't think I didn't notice that [spoiler]Selenitic rocket ship[/spoiler] at the end! Nice nod. ;)

So I finished the game, and I liked it. Story is really good well written and well acted. Only issue with it is Audio mix is off and no separate volume controls so can be hard to hear the voices I had to turn subtitles on. Game looks and runs well for the most part there are some really iffy textures and geometry in places. Gameplay is very basic and involves you go through memories and collecting objects from your past you get a journal entry with a writing about them. then you solve a very simple 3x3 picture puzzle. it's super short, It was 2 hours for me. So at the current price $20.49CAD it's a bit steep to be honest. there is no zoom there are pages and stuff in the environment I would love to be able to zoom into to read. also would be nice if there were more objects in the world you could pick up and examine besides the objective items. The spinning the objects you need to pick up just feels wrong and doesn't move the way you would expect with the right stick. But I am glad I played it I give it a 7/10. Updating review: I have played through again in VR and it's a super great experience.

Wow...well...the other reviews were right, and this is very disappointing coming from something that Cyan put their name behind. It is nothing like a Cyan game. This is not at all a puzzle game. It's barely an interactive story. It's voice overs while you try to find all the things you can click on in a space before the game will let you move to the next area. Oh, sure there's some rudimentary slider/jigsaw type puzzles...but they're simple enough for a child...The story, nor environments are enough to save this game from it's incredible lack of game play. The game does nothing to get me to care about the characters; instead, it seems to manipulate you into caring based on the premise that the main character has some sort of degenerative brain disorder. I'm a huge Cyan Stan...but woof...pass on this game....

This is obviously a passion project for the makers. The story is nice, the voice acting and the music are excellent. Reminiscent of the "Stanley Parable" and even more like "The Beginners guide". Those games, however, had a quirk. Something fun that would make it playable. This story isn't a game. It's an audiobook that let's you walk around. Walk around clicking all the highlighted items and solve a very simple slide puzzle to advance to the next room. There's a journal in which you can read the story behind each item you click but there's no penalty or reward if you do or don't. Coming from Cyan, I was a bit disappointed. Played through it in 2 hours. If you're axpecting a puzzle game, don't buy it. If you like listening to a story while you click things, do.

tldr - If the idea of this story spoke to you, I'd really recommend checking out Sanitarium instead, which is cheap on Steam and GOG - it's also about a man trapped in his head and grappling with his past. Sanitarium is touching, scary, hilarious, and delightful. e: I received a response from Eager to which I felt I should respond, and have done so at the end of this post. e2: added one final thought below. ZED has released in an exceptionally rough state. I found out after buying it today that the game had "changed focus" and was no longer a puzzle game, but it's clear upon playing it that the game has gone through some sort of severe developmental trouble and has, for whatever reason, been simplified/gutted to get it out the door. The product they've released on Steam only matches the original Kickstarter pitch in the most surface-level, empty ways. I'm disappointed in how it turned out, but really hope that Chuck Carter can gather himself and knock it out of the park next time. Chuck is an exceptionally talented artist with an eye for environments, but it didn't work out on the gameplay side this time. For now, I'd just wait for Firmament. There are no environmental puzzles (or interaction really) of any kind. Each section of the game involves either waiting for voiceovers to end before a door opens, or walking/backtracking through an environment to find and pick up objects, which triggers a simple picture-matching puzzle on the exit door. FInding the objects adds a new entry to your journal, the animation for opening which kills any exploration momentum i had, to the point that I just stopped reading the journal until the very end once I'd found everything. The puzzle UI is very finicky, sluggish, and often does not respond to mouse clicks. Apparently the VR is not great either, only supporting teleporting. The story as originally intended may have been more poignant, but I found the player character to be yet another horribly unlikeable Bad Dad, who regrets being a Bad Dad and tries to make up for being a Bad Dad. I felt one(1) emotion at the end, but the story was so truncated that it never really hit home. Here are a couple tips if you end up buying this game that should clarify a few things I was confused about: 1. Stephen Russell just kinda talks to himself sometimes? like sometimes he says the same thing twice overlapping himself? One Stephen Russell is sassier than the other. This is because the sassy Stephen Russell is meant to be someone called "The Dreamer," a personified version of Prime Stephen Russell's warped mind, who would twist and turn the game world to challenge the player. This is not explained or explored or justified in the finished game, the Dreamer now does nothing but bicker, and I had no idea what the heck that was supposed to be about until I went back and re-read the original Kickstarter pitch. 2. The game turns black & white at one point for a little bit in the "hub world" you return to several times during which you hear a voice mail somebody sent you. This appears to be a reference to the sentence "The mood in ZED changes from sinister to sublime in a matter of heartbeats" from the Kickstarter pitch. The moment where it turns black&white for a little bit is apparently the most they could get out of it. e: I've received a response from Eager describing how they had, in fact, discussed how they had altered the game from the initial KS pitch, and they're right! After playing the game, I was able to find some of this on my own. However, as I was unable to afford a pledge back when the Kickstarter was live, so I did not receive these updates. I never meant to insinuate that you were not upfront about changing the game. I simply meant that, after wishlisting the game on Steam, it was as I said: nowhere on Steam was it mentioned that the game was altered, and so had no reason to look for what had changed until after I had played the game. While expectations being subverted on their own is never inherently a bad thing (not to mention that I am what you'd call a Walking Simulator Enthusiast and am no hater of narrative-based games), the game's roughly 90 minute playtime read as a truncated, stretched experience - especially when more than a few of those minutes were simply spent waiting for voice acting to complete and a door to open. Having spent a day thinking about it, I think a good representative example for my reservations about ZED comes from the big "City" map. It's probably the largest map in the game, and certainly the most intricate; the visual used most prominently in marketing materials for the game. However, when you finally get there you find that you are locked to a series of narrow walkways that are completely separate from the environment. The space of the city does not factor into the design of the playable space in any way, and you're not encouraged (or really able) to explore what is, in my opinion, the most visually engaging space in the game. You're just stuck looking at it from a distance, a voyeur of a static, empty series of meticulously designed buildings, picking up stuffed animals and reading a journal, before winding back around trying to find the door, after which you spend a couple minutes fiddling with a picture-matching puzzle to continue onto the next small area. Just like how the player character never actually interacts with anyone but himself, only hearing other characters' answering machine messages, the player/game connection feels lax if not nonexistent. Having worked on some prolonged, deeply personal performance projects for years, and been terrified and anxious and excited to show them to the folks that would take the time to experience them, I understand and fully empathize that this is a personal project that means a lot to the people involved. But to respond to me that "this game isn't for everyone" and "Other people liked it" feels a little dismissive, as if your work is above critical discussion, like my experience isn't valid. I don't know if this is what you believe or if it's what you feel like you have to say, but either way it didn't feel great. Just to be clear, I'm not in any way saying "debate me!!!!" as really at the end of the day I think you should just keep doing what you think is best, but I felt like writing about what I saw and this was the forum in which I chose to do it. e2: just one last thought before i probably put this game behind me (forgive me, I cannot remember the player character's name and can't find it anywhere, so I'll just use his voice actor's): in order for Stephen Russell's character to "redeem" himself, he makes a comic for his newborn granddaughter. In it, he predicts (for no reason I can discern) that Charlotte will one day fly a rocket ship. We also learn that Charlotte does indeed eventually move away from the family home to pursue a career in rocket science. There's something missing here - Where is Charlotte's story? What happened in her life to make her follow through on her grandfather's book? Was it her mother? What [i]about[/i] Charlotte's mother, who Stephen seems to push away for most of her life, but eventually finds it in herself to put (at least parts of) her life aside to help her dad figure out the problem with the Zed rights? What about Stephen's wife, Charlotte? How did Charlotte cope with the drinking, how did she feel about him? What was the impact of her horrible death on her daughter? There's a story about at least three generations of women here, just out of reach, which just serve as set dressing and reification to the smarmily-remembered memories of a life poorly lived. Of course, not everything that happened to Stephen was Stephen's fault, but if we're supposed to understand that Stephen really did affect the lives of other people through his work, why can't we see more of the people he affected? The actual impact of a regrettable life is [i]not[/i] primarily within the person doing the regretting.