COMPLETE/ABANDONED: Varenje
Jul. 22nd, 2018 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoMuch like Escape the Game, I'm giving myself COMPLETE credit for this because it's an episodic game and I finished chapter 1, and ABANDONED credit because I opted not to play the rest.
Varenje is an adventure/sort of Hidden Object game. The presentation is cute and charming, the art style is gorgeous, and the music is fine if not repetitive by the tenth time it loops. However, the actual puzzles are grating to the point of frustration. Expect lots of wandering back and forth around the same three screens of untidy clutter because this next goal wants you to collect nine ribbons, nine tiny metal bars, four light bulbs, three transistors, two crystal balls, and presumably the partridge in a pear tree is the final puzzle you do once you've gathered all the ingredients.
My heart kind of sank every time I went through an actual literal junk drawer, because I knew I'd be back on this screen at least four more times. (You can't pick up any of this stuff until you get the event flag and are supposed to know you need it, naturally.) It's not a pixel hunt in the way the reviewers are describing it, though some of the junk drawers are a bit too tiny and missable. However, it's an Easter egg hunt, for sure. I ended up using a lot of hints not because I couldn't figure out a puzzle, but because "oh for heaven's sake I have 8/9 ribbons and I know the last one's somewhere but I don't have time for this," which kind of felt like the adventure game version of Fake Difficulty.
All in all, this game actually isn't horrible. I love the aesthetic. The "big" puzzles after gathering everything are mostly fine. I'm interested in the plot enough to regret the not-knowing-how-it-goes that comes with opting not to continue. I just... those scavenger hunts, man.
I may come back to this later, because I honestly did enjoy this enough while I was playing it, frustrations aside. It's just that I've hit the point of game saturation, such that I really have to stop and question why I'm playing "I could maybe get into this, frustrations aside"-tier roughness when I have an immense backlog of outstanding near-flawless games in the same genre that I could (and probably should) be playing instead.
Varenje is an adventure/sort of Hidden Object game. The presentation is cute and charming, the art style is gorgeous, and the music is fine if not repetitive by the tenth time it loops. However, the actual puzzles are grating to the point of frustration. Expect lots of wandering back and forth around the same three screens of untidy clutter because this next goal wants you to collect nine ribbons, nine tiny metal bars, four light bulbs, three transistors, two crystal balls, and presumably the partridge in a pear tree is the final puzzle you do once you've gathered all the ingredients.
My heart kind of sank every time I went through an actual literal junk drawer, because I knew I'd be back on this screen at least four more times. (You can't pick up any of this stuff until you get the event flag and are supposed to know you need it, naturally.) It's not a pixel hunt in the way the reviewers are describing it, though some of the junk drawers are a bit too tiny and missable. However, it's an Easter egg hunt, for sure. I ended up using a lot of hints not because I couldn't figure out a puzzle, but because "oh for heaven's sake I have 8/9 ribbons and I know the last one's somewhere but I don't have time for this," which kind of felt like the adventure game version of Fake Difficulty.
All in all, this game actually isn't horrible. I love the aesthetic. The "big" puzzles after gathering everything are mostly fine. I'm interested in the plot enough to regret the not-knowing-how-it-goes that comes with opting not to continue. I just... those scavenger hunts, man.
I may come back to this later, because I honestly did enjoy this enough while I was playing it, frustrations aside. It's just that I've hit the point of game saturation, such that I really have to stop and question why I'm playing "I could maybe get into this, frustrations aside"-tier roughness when I have an immense backlog of outstanding near-flawless games in the same genre that I could (and probably should) be playing instead.