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23 reviews · 7 essays
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Counterpoint on Gone Home — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave Gone Home 8/10. I went through Steam's 4,198 negative reviews instead — "barely even a game," "two hours for twenty dollars," "an overhyped soap opera" — and tested five recurring claims against the game's design.
Soundtrack: Myst — the presence that flowed into an island that had decided against music
Cyan's Robyn Miller first intended to put no music in Myst at all, believing it would get in the way of the puzzles. But a few tests showed that sound did help 'the mood of the places' — and so roughly forty minutes of music, written on a single synth across two weeks of evenings, later flowed into the island. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart a score that began from the side of subtraction, and the Selenitic mechanism where sound itself becomes the key.
Counterpoint on ANIMAL WELL — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Against Komugi's 8.7/10 for ANIMAL WELL, I examine five claims drawn from the negative Steam reviews — retry cost, the refusal to guide, the absence of story and music, "it's actually a platformer," and a deepest layer premised on collective intelligence. I agree with two of them and push back on the other three.
Soundtrack: Riven — On an island where you stand still, the music refuses to conclude
Cyan's Robyn Miller returned after 27 years to re-voice, for the 2024 remake, the music he first wrote for Riven. On an island you can wander freely, the score is not allowed to swell — and in a puzzle-adventure of observation and note-taking, water and machinery, not melody, take the lead. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
Counterpoint on Superliminal — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Against Komugi's 7.5/10 for Superliminal, I examine five claims drawn from the negative Steam reviews — length versus price, shallow puzzles, a second half that turns into a walking simulator, motion sickness, and an unearned ending speech. I agree with the sag in the back half and the sermonizing finale, and push back on the verdict that short automatically means bad value.
Soundtrack: Carto — Rearrange the map, and the music rearranges too
The 31 pieces Eddie Yu wrote for Carto are all short, round-cornered, and faintly acoustic. In this game the player rearranges map tiles to reassemble the world itself. What is lovely is that the music, too, is keyed to place and gets rearranged with it. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this music can keep playing over long deliberation without ever tiring you out, through a lens you can carry home to your own composing.
Counterpoint on TUNIC — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Against Komugi's 8.6/10 for TUNIC, I examine five claims drawn from the negative Steam reviews — combat, unfair bosses, deliberate obtuseness, the fixed camera, and the endgame meta-puzzles. I agree with one of them and push back on the rest.
Related reviews
Samorost 3
A point-and-click adventure across nine tiny worlds with no dialogue and no text, where a hooded figure carries a found brass flute and opens the way by playing notes at rocks, creatures and machines. From Amanita Design, the studio behind Machinarium.
puzzlepoint-and-clickexplorationGone Home
A first-person exploration game: home on a rainy night in June 1995 after a year abroad, you open every door and drawer of an empty house and reconstruct a year of family history from the letters, cassettes and magazines left behind. No combat, no puzzles, no fail state — the verbs are open, pick up, read. The first game from Fullbright, founded by veterans of BioShock.
explorationobservationmysteryThe Vanishing of Ethan Carter
A first-person mystery in which you play an occult detective, walking a deserted valley to examine bodies and belongings and reassemble each death by putting the scattered fragments back in order — a photogrammetry-built forest explored with no map and no HUD, from The Astronauts.
investigationobservationnarrative-puzzleMyst
A first-person puzzle adventure: you arrive on an unknown island and move between an abandoned library and four Ages, piecing together a story of family betrayal from machines and journals alone. Cyan Worlds' own Unreal Engine rebuild of their 1993 original, walkable flat or in VR, with optional puzzle randomization.
puzzleadventurefirst-personFirmament
A first-person puzzle-adventure from Cyan Worlds, the studio behind Myst and Riven. You plug a wrist-mounted tool, the Adjunct, into sockets to work cranes and generators as you cross three abandoned steampunk realms — a meditative world with no ciphers and no notes to take.
puzzleadventureexplorationObservation
You are S.A.M., the AI of a damaged space station: switch between cameras, drift through the corridors as a spherical drone, and piece together what happened to the vanished crew — and to yourself. You aren't on the station; you are the station. From No Code, makers of Stories Untold.
puzzlenarrativefirst-personQuern - Undying Thoughts
A first-person puzzle adventure: stranded on an island with no way back, you open some fifty doors by working gears, crystals and alchemy, and solved contraptions return, reused, so the whole island reads as one machine. A 2016 homage to Myst and Riven from the four-person studio Zadbox.
puzzleadventuremysteryRiven
Cyan Worlds' own ground-up 3D remake of the 1997 classic — a first-person puzzle adventure with no hints and no highlighting, where you walk a collapsing island and read its water, machines and D'ni number system to unlock its secrets.
puzzleadventureFRACT OSC
A first-person musical-exploration puzzle set in a vast synthesizer-built ruin, where you actuate glowing nodes and sound rigs to wake dormant machinery and music back to life. There's almost no instruction; working out what is even interactive is itself the puzzle. Phosfiend Systems, 2014, winner of IndieCade's audio design award.
puzzleexplorationfirst-personThe Looker
A first-person puzzler where you wake on a strangely familiar island and clear line-drawing panels — built entirely to parody The Witness. A free, roughly two-hour piece by Subcreation Studio.
puzzleobservationfirst-personANIMAL WELL
A puzzle-box metroidvania: hatch from a flower and descend a dense, interconnected 2D labyrinth. You do not fight — you combine multi-use tools and notice things (a hole in a wall, a picture in the background) to solve it. Past the ending lies a layer of secrets only a community can crack, made largely by one person, Billy Basso.
puzzlemetroidvaniaexplorationNaissanceE
A first-person exploration game about descending into the depths of a vast artificial structure drawn only in black and white. With a handful of actions — run, jump, and stir light and shadow — you travel an inhuman-scale world that recalls Piranesi's etchings and the manga BLAME!. Released in 2014 and now distributed free by Limasse Five.
explorationpuzzle-platformerfirst-personParadise Killer
A first-person open-world detective adventure set on Paradise, an artificial island of alien-god worshippers where the ruling Council is murdered. Investigator Lady Love Dies gathers evidence, decides for herself who is guilty, and proves the case at trial — a whodunit with no single 'correct' answer, wrapped in a vaporwave world.
mysterydetectiveadventureThe Painscreek Killings
A first-person detective game in which you play a journalist combing the abandoned town of Painscreek — hunting keys, notes and diaries to solve a cold murder case. No quest markers, no hint system; your own notebook is the only tool. Made and published in 2017 by EQ Studios.
investigationobservationnarrative-puzzleIsles of Sea and Sky
A memory-less castaway pushes blocks — and only pushes them — through traps and portals across an open ocean of islands. Each island twists one mechanic while a wordless myth unfolds, growing a bottomless labyrinth from one verb. From Cicada Games.
puzzlesokoban-likeexplorationCall of the Sea
A first-person adventure puzzler set in the 1930s South Pacific, where Norah lands on an unknown island chasing her husband's lost expedition, reading journals and inscriptions and turning devices to unlock its secrets — Out of the Blue's Lovecraftian entry in the Myst lineage.
puzzleadventurefirst-personCarto
A hand-drawn exploration puzzle where you rearrange the map pieces you find — match a forest or sea edge and the terrain joins up, revealing paths and people. Sunhead Games builds a warm, unhurried adventure on a single, clever verb.
puzzleadventureLingo
A first-person word-puzzle game where a single word on a wall is your clue: type an answer built from anagrams and wordplay to open the next door. Its non-Euclidean world — stitched together by warps and impossible staircases — is itself one enormous clue board for the rules you must deduce. A solo work by Brenton Wildes in the lineage of The Witness.
puzzlefirst-personrule-discoveryTUNIC
An isometric, Zelda-like action-adventure starring a small fox. Its real star is the in-game instruction manual you rebuild page by page — most of it written in an invented runic script you decode yourself, hiding maps, controls, and the deepest secrets. By TUNIC Team / Finji, 2022.
puzzleexplorationmetroidvaniaObduction
Touch an artifact that falls from the night sky by a lake and you are flung to an alien landscape stitched from fragments of Earth across times and places. Walk, observe, and solve the machinery linking world to world to find your way home—a first-person adventure from Cyan, the studio behind Myst, that makes observation its only verb.
puzzleadventurefirst-personFEZ
An exploration platformer where you rotate a 2D world in 90-degree turns, shifting how the plane reads to connect platforms. Collect cube fragments while wandering a crumbling world — Polytron Corporation's signature take on rotation.
puzzle-platformerexplorationobservationSuperliminal
A first-person puzzle where perspective alone decides how big things are.
first-personexplorationManifold Garden
A first-person puzzle about choosing your gravity inside an Escher-esque world of infinitely repeating architecture.
puzzlefirst-personexploration
