RiME

A lovely game full of calm, almost dreamy exploration, as well as delightful and sad surprises. I strongly recommend it for people like me, realizing fully that others might find it boring and confusing.

The gameplay is generally linear but gives you as much time as you'd like to explore each level. There are environmental puzzles: not too challenging and yet still satisfyingly composed. And yet the puzzles are more like focal points for your attention, small moments along a grand path. The true core of the gameplay is exploration.

Exploration is rewarding. The levels are beautifully designed, and there are nooks and crannies from which you can peek at familiar vistas from new angles. Many people who dislike the gameplay still admit that it's visually breathtaking. And there are small secrets (collectibles) to be found for meaningful achievements. (You can return and collect all of them after you've finished the game, so don't fret.)

The unspoken narrative is more of a loose poem than tight prose, even though it does coalesce in the end. You can assemble meanings and feelings yourself or read that interview with Raúl Rubio Munárriz in which he explains the basic intent. But he was just one person on the dev team, and there are many layers. Good art can evoke many perspectives.

Some have reviewed this game as being boring and tritely sentimental. I can't argue against taste, but it seems that I value the things they find unimportant. Some say a pale imitation of Ico, a game that likely inspired it. Well, I recently played Ico on the PlayStation 2, and RiME is a vast improvement. It has more imaginative and diverse levels, more satisfying puzzles, and a more creative story. It's funny how nostalgia makes old games seem better than they are.

Finally, some criticism. What I can say is that Ico achieved a lot with very little, and sometimes RiME can seem too lush and crammed with ideas. It's a nice long game, but perhaps it would have been more poignant if it were more compact, the themes drawn together a bit more starkly.

And as many have pointed out, the game has technical difficulties. Frame rates are not great even on high-end hardware. You can overcome stuttering by reducing the graphics quality and even the resolution. The game will still be beautiful, trust me. I was specifically annoyed that I couldn't get my Xbox controller to work with it, even though it works fine in other Steam games.