Pneuma: Breath of Life

This short first-person puzzle game is clever and very pretty. The puzzle solutions often require quite a bit of experimentation and observation skills. Sometimes the most obvious solutions are the hardest to figure out. However, not all puzzles are great: some are quite trivial. Perhaps if the game were longer the weaker puzzles would not feel so bleh.

Unfortunately, though there are some original puzzle mechanics, the game as a whole feels very derivative of other games, most notably of The Talos Principle in its look, feel, and thematic discussion. Is it really so hard to come up with original ideas in this genre? Apparently it is, because the developers' next game, The Turing Test, is even more blatantly derivative, specifically of Portal. Pneuma is a good if short game, but it's hard not to be annoyed by its lack of originality.

It seems many reviewers found Pneuma's narrator to be insufferable. For me, it did get to be a bit much later in the game. However, the game is so short that it never becomes too grating.