Bought on Steam, unplayed for a long time because it doesn't run on Linux. When I got a new Windows machine Summer 2021 I finally played through it in a few days.

A lot of this game was cool puzzle design in need of better tech: The world swap puzzles are good, but having a loading screen with every swap was frustrating, especially near the end. I really wanted Super Meat Boy-reset-fast swaps. This was a significant enough issue that I feel like it'd be a noticeably shorter game without it.

I also found myself wanting a fast-travel solution, or at least an auto-walk. While navigation is largely the puzzle and the pleasure of this sort of game, there were a number of times when I'd find myself standing on one cliff looking at another cliff I'd already visited, and wishing I could just click on it to teleport or auto-walk there. Of course, this would require a fairly complex reachability and puzzle memory feature reminiscent of Hadean Lands - but this would be in the interest of enabling the player to move to the interesting decisions as smoothly as possible.

I had access to a VR headset but chose not to play this game in VR. It never felt built for it, to me, and also I'm kind of fighting to justify VR for anything but social experiences. I'm excited about Firmament though.

I played through the game fairly quick with a little walkthrough help. Maybe because of this, the story didn't really sink in and the final “choice” to get the good ending didn't make sense to me at first, even knowing what it was. Why was the battery important? What was it supposed to do? The game mentions it over and over again but doesn't really explain what CW is trying to do with it, so you're expected to intuit a whole series of things: That he intends to swap the town back to Earth, that Earth is uninhabitable, that the swap will be irreversible, that CW doesn't know Farley survived, that blowing up the tower without the battery and without obviously rescuing the chambered residents will somehow reunite everyone. After reading a few interpretations of the ending I can kind of see it… maybe. Other things about the game felt incomplete too, there are a surprising number of red herrings and no set of puzzles presented that feeling of mastering a complete system that the best Myst games had.

Best moment: Realizing that the cliffs area and the jungle area were separate worlds, and I could walk through the outside boundary like I could in Hunrath.