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Apr 1, 2023
There isn’t a world where I say that ATONE: Heart of the Elder Tree is a bad game, but I did get a distinct impression that it didn’t want to be a game. ATONE feels like a project that wanted to be a visual novel rather than a puzzle game, and that made it much harder to play than it should have been. A lot of care is given to characterisation, visuals and music to craft an immersive, interesting experience, but that care does not seem to extend itself to much of the gameplay segments. And gameplay is the thing that sets video games apart from other media. It is still enjoyable and of course, it still does more than enough to be a puzzle game, but it feels like only half of it was approached with ambition.