The End of the Sun

Strong no. This game is barely playable.

Which is sad, because obviously a lot of passion went into its making. Unfortunately passion cannot fix bad design. Very bad design.

The premise is that you are a mystic who must fix a broken timeline by solving puzzles while switching between four seasons. It takes place in a gorgeous countryside, which is peppered with well-researched Slavic folklore. Sounds great, right? It's not.

The main issue is that the core mechanics are convoluted and poorly indicated. It's ostensibly a puzzle game, but there are several aggravating layers of confusion until you actually get to the puzzles.

You need to enter into a "puzzle mode", but you can only do so in specific places during specific seasons. There are the four seasons, which I think we are all quite familiar with, but for some unknown reason they are numbered, which completely threw me off. Are there three different winters? No, they must be numbered just to confuse me. Also the puzzle activators are the seasonal teleporters. But only if you're in the right season. And the color of the puzzle indicator changes subtly when you solve part of the puzzle. Got it? None of this is explained to you, ever, and despite finishing the game there are still aspects to these mechanics that I don't understand. Like, why does the time of day sometimes speed up? The puzzles themselves are mostly simplistic and unsatisfying.

What's really baffling is that all these layers of confusion are entirely unnecessary. They could have just placed puzzles in the world and let you solve them. But instead you have to spend most of your time trying to figure out how this game works.

The problems don't stop there. For one, the world is quite big, with a lot of empty spaces, but the default walk speed is unbearably slow. So you'll be pressing "run" the whole game. There is an in-game map, but for the life of me I couldn't make head or tails out of it. It doesn't show you where you are. It only vaguely matches the terrain and has unclear icons on it "explained" by an obtuse legend. I only figured things out by the time I finished the game. And exploring this world is generally unpleasant: there are invisible walls everywhere and there doesn't seem to be any real-world logic to their placement. The devs just don't want you to wander freely, even though it totally looks like you could.

Is the story at least good? No, not really. The timeline premise means that you will receive the narrative in out-of-order fragments. Quite a storytelling challenge, which could amount to something quite interesting, but as expected it doesn't. It's impossible to care about characters that you don't get to know and moreover don't want to know. Everybody you meet is quite unlikable. I think the root of the problem is poor storytelling. Maybe it's that the English translation is clunky and awkward, though I suspect the Polish script is not much better. Maybe it's that the voice actors do a miserable job at it and clearly have no familiarity with the subject matter (their pronunciation of Slavic words and names seems to change with every sentence). Or maybe it's that the devs care more about teaching you about folklore than weaving a satisfying tale.

I must point out that there were a handful of delightful moments in the game. The Slavic flavor is wonderful. There are some nice vistas (if you can get around the invisible walls to reach them), and the music is beautiful. Finally, a few of the spirits you meet are positively hilarious.

But the bottom line is that The End of the Sun delivers the opposite of delight. Skip it.