If you're looking for a game to soothe your twelve-week-old snot-ridden baby to sleep at 5.30am, I can recommend nothing more highly. My boy stared at it like it was made of magic, and eventually drifted to blissful sleep. It's hard to deny this biases my opinion of the game quite significantly.
It's a comfortable game, lots to do, very silly, definitely fun to play. But it's also sitting still, putting its feet up, rather than surprising us with something delightfully new.
Most of the game is about painfully slowly walking your paper person to the next glowing spot on the ground, and pulling at the big glowing circle that appears, then painfully slowly walking back again.
What we've got here is a mildly absorbing romp through an extremely generic setting, delivered with no sense of aplomb.
It's only £4, and I'm in no doubt that what felt to me like a cynical result didn't come from a cynical place. My guess is it came from too small an idea, too ambiguously delivered, created with a passion that doesn't reach the player.
Everything in this sequel is bigger, more elaborate, more detailed, and absolutely better. Which, after such a lovely first game, is quite the thing.
There is definitely a lot to be said for using adventure games to explore more mundane events. They don't all need a murder, or a ghost, or a time travelling robot. But I would argue they do need something more than real estate.
But wow, I've enjoyed it.
So, so much effort has gone into this. But sadly, to little entertaining result.
It is, however, probably the most aesthetically beautiful game I've seen, and I can genuinely recommend it on that basis alone. The rest of the game, it's sombre tale, is well worth hearing, and some of the puzzles are really splendid. But every time you walk out of a door and see the vista spread before you, it's an effort not to gasp.
There's no story worth hearing, there's no immediate hook that makes this different from anything else, and nothing special about the combat or the questing to make me care.
It's enormously clever, and very often inspired in how it delivers this cleverness. But for me it was simply too fast, too busy stumbling over itself to do the next even more difficult thing, that it forgot to ensure I'd fathomed the previous.
Chapter 2 is a big step up from the already decent Chapter 1, and delivers lots of rewarding answers on the plot, while introducing enough to make the final chapter worth waiting for, however long that wait might be.
It's such a colossal shame, but I am certain not one that should put you off playing Mind. The puzzles are genuinely great, and it's just so unrelentingly eye-warmingly beautiful, that it wins out. As visual, explorable art, it's masterful. As a puzzle game, it's rewarding and taxing. As a narrative, it's a car driving into a lake. But in this case, two out of three is really rather good.
It's unquestionably smart, almost intolerably cute, and splendidly novel. I'm not quite convinced the balancing is right, and think the levels become too cluttered, too quickly. But it remains completely lovely to play despite it.
But instead it's the rusting chassis of an ARPG, after it's been stripped down for parts and left, abandoned in a disused yard, where it really ought to be forgotten.
The key is, I do enjoy playing it. I'm still far from finished, but have played for an awfully long time. For a tenner, that's a lot of game. It's somewhat obnoxious, but special for just getting on with being a game.
It's beautiful, no doubt. The pixel art is wonderful, and the soundtrack is splendid. Looking at just the screenshots, I'd be reaching for my wallet. But the core game is just so tedious. By the fifth chapter, you're literally wandering through near-identical scenes of desert, and at this point I'm honestly wondering if maybe this is the point?
Moebius is an utter disaster of a game. An entirely unlikeable or vacuous cast, a contempt for women like I've never seen, and indeed almost equal contempt for men, gibberish puzzles, ghastly animation, flawed conceits, the stupidest plot idea I can remember, and the whole thing scored with lift music. It's as if the moustache puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 got an agent, and a starring role as an entire game.
The game is clearly enormously detailed, a real passion piece, and one I fought and fought to enjoy. It didn't work out for me. I suspect it may for others.