Hello again everyone!

I hope the week has started off well for you all and the creative vibes are still flowing for writing.

Today I want to jump in and look at a Rime which I just finished over this last weekend.  Rime is an absolutely gorgeous game filled with some pretty amazing music and beautiful art.  The game has some very mysterious elements which fill a strange world you get to explore, but the game lacks new ideas to make it stand out from other puzzle platformers.  Unfortunately, most of the puzzles in the game are bland and instead of a challenge we get monotonous.

Overall Rime’s story is pretty basic: you wake up on some strange island after a shipwreck, and have to solve a mix of puzzles in this new world to try and piece together what really happened.  You start the game with a nameless character who doesn’t speak or have many features you can make out except his figure and a red cloak.  Your guide through the game is a small fox who has more personality than you do…that’s for darn sure.  This fox mainly helps you navigate the world and points you in the right direction which is a huge help through the game.  You can do some exploration as the world is pretty open, so it’s nice to have a guide back to where the next progression point is.

The games puzzles you complete throughout the world seem more like simple tasks and don’t offer a lot of challenge to figure out.  Exploring the world can be fun as it’s got an amazing art style to it, but ultimately all the puzzles and tasks to figure out pull away from things instead of adding to the beauty of the story.  Even though I got bored at times from the puzzles, I love artistic style games so that’s ultimately what caught and held my attention in Rime.  The world exploration does offer up some hidden collectibles you can gather, but at the end all they gave you was a picture that showed up on the menu screen.  I gave up the pursuit of finding all the collectibles pretty early on honestly as it seemed pointless and didn’t add to the game or story you were just thrust into.

I go back to the aesthetic aspects of this game being it’s winning factor for holding my attention again, as the game was littered with bugs and performance issues.  Multiple times I had camera issues where it got stuck in strange places, and an overall clunky climbing experience while all topped off with some choppy screens due to loss of frame-rate.  This game has a mystery to it that had me glued to the screen but at the end of things it didn’t deliver.  I loved the open world feel, the artistic beauty and hooks to keep you interested in the story along the way….but all said and done this game wasn’t an experience I enjoyed once things came to a close.