←Reviews
Read the abridged version of this review on Steam!

NaissanceE

They forgot the textures!!

NaissanceE is a walking simulator that sometimes makes it suck to walk. I downloaded this game with no expectation of a compelling narrative or mystery, just hoping for some cool visuals to look at. A lot of the environments are cool and interesting, but some parts of the game are just needlessly confusing, annoying, or janky. Each chapter has somewhat its own personality, so I'll go over them one at a time.

Chapters

01 Follow The Light

The game opens by blinding the player, you enter a room that gets so bright your screen goes completely white before opening a door to the rest of the game, a pretty harsh welcome, but perhaps that's the point. We run down a long and very detailed hallway, which does look kind of neat, but then we spend the rest of our time largely running through nondescript rooms and corridors while (as the chapter title would suggest) chasing little light orbs around. There are a few interesting structures to look at, but the main idea here seems to be some simple platforming puzzles in confined spaces with mostly featureless walls.

02 Going Down

This is where the game first opens up into a large and visually captivating environment, and to its credit, this section of the game looks really cool. Everywhere you look you could make a cool desktop background, and figuring your way down, especially at the beginning feels very tense and adventurous. This is the longest section of the game, and you can definitely see why.

That said, this part of the game may actually be too long. While the scenery is breathtaking, I have plenty of time to get my breath back by the time I get to see anything new, we spend an awfully long time exploring the same environment without really learning anything new about it. It's fun to take little breathers along the way down and marvel at the scale of the place, but at some point, it's just a place.

The scenery of this section is kind of divided into 2 "parts": A long shaft we carefully descend, where we are somewhat guided by the chapter title to trend downwards, and then there's "the bottom". The latter of the 2 I found rather annoying to navigate. The environment, while cool, was very large and very repetitive. The path to progress felt mazelike, having me lost for several minutes at a time looking in every dark corridor for a hidden ladder or staircase to get to the next part.

I did really like the visuals of this part of the game, but I still feel like it overstays its welcome. In a game about looking at things, you should probably give the player more than 2 things to look at over a stretch of playtime this long.

03 Breath Compression

This section of the game was probably the worst. For a game I took interest in to look at cool visuals, walking around in Chuck-E-Cheese tunnels for an hour felt like a massive waste of my time. The chapter begins with a kinda fun (albeit easy) puzzle, and then you just wander around some tubes forever.

There were several sections where I opted to walk backwards, as the corridors were so dark I couldn't tell if I was even progressing (which should not happen when I set up the gamma as per the developer recommendation). The only thing to look at in this entire section of the game is these stupid turbine platforming sections that all felt needlessly janky and annoying. None of them were particularly difficult, but I wasn't trying to play a 3D platforming rule-discovery game about what inputs don't suck me into a jet engine when I downloaded this game.

04 Deeper into Madness

I have very mixed feelings about this section. Overall I think my opinion on it is positive. I really like when games experiment with a bunch of interesting visuals and play with their environments in unique ways. The only room here that I think is genuinely bad is the one that flash-bangs you repeatedly, and you can't tell what the hell is happening on your screen. Often waiting several seconds for a brief flicker of light to show you what is stairs and what is hole.

Overall though, I think this is a really cool sequence. There are some questionable aspects here and there, but I generally enjoyed this part of the game. It manages to very effectively convey the stress of whatever the player character is experiencing psychologically, and a lot of the visual tricks and effects used are creative and interesting. I think I got a little more agitated here than I should have because I was streaming the game, but there was a lot of cool stuff to see here.

05 Interlude

I wish the whole game could have been like this. You just wander through a disappointingly short sequence of breathtaking environments, with something new to stop and stare at behind every doorway. Thinking back there are only like, 3 things to look at in this entire chapter, but I was very pleased by all of them, especially the suspension bridge between the two walls with the lightning arcing between, coolest visual in the whole game for me. Also marked the first time I paused for a substantial amount of time just to take in my environment before moving on. Everything else that was pretty to look at had me stuck there for an hour regardless. More on the staircase at the end of the chapter later.

06 Endless Dive

Big Empty but with things. This area aptly captures the sensation of wandering through the desert. I did comment while playing that it takes a very long time to travel between points of interest, but at the same time I feel like it would be difficult to emphasize the vastness and emptiness of the location while still allowing quick traversal. That said, I can't say that the amount of time it took to walk anywhere didn't dissuade me from exploring the area more thoroughly, and I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn I've missed some optional content in this part of the game.

As for the optional content I did find, the music box was pretty cool, but felt pretty out of place in this environment, added to a certain lack of cohesion I felt throughout the entire game, but I'll touch on that more later. As for the small village with the shader towers, it felt interesting but just, really odd? It certainly acknowledges an explorative player, though I don't know if I'd say it rewards one. My first time encountering this area, I was convinced it had to do with progression, just due to the new audio track paired with the 1st sign of "creatures" that moved somewhat organically since the wall-slug things in Going Down. I think the shaders you get at the top of each structure are kind of neat, but it's hard to argue they're worth the effort of exploring. Maybe I would've felt differently if I wasn't so convinced I was missing something to progress, but I absolutely disagree with how much each climb depends on waiting as a mechanic.

I will say I appreciate that if you wander around long enough you will inevitably stumble across the monument that tells you how to progress to the final chapter, because otherwise I don't know how you would figure out the solution.

07 Meet the Host

Not much to be said about this section. The host is adequately terrifying in its cutscene. The visuals during the run are kind of cool, but certain sections make it really difficult to discern where you're meant to go next, especially under the time pressure. Following the lamps seems straightforward enough but even still sometimes the lamps were difficult to follow.

Subtext

Something I kind of had nagging at the back of my mind throughout the game is the lack of context for anything. I don't think a game necessarily needs to have a point, especially one like this, but it still felt like something was missing. Something about the complete absence of context left a little too much of a gap to be filled by the player. I don't think the game would've been better if it gave me all the answers, but I wish it had at least presented me with the questions.

Part of this issue is driven by a lack of cohesion. Some parts of the game take place in this large industrial landscape with structures representing buildings, monuments, or machines, while other sections take place in this formless enigmatic cube world. It's hard to corroborate these 2 aesthetic environments. My first instinct upon reaching "Going Down" was that perhaps this was some sort of facility I had to discern the purpose of, but the whole thing just felt so devoid of meaning. It felt like a puzzle made of pieces that didn't fit together.

By the end of the game, it still isn't clear to me if the author's intention was to present a mystery about the environments we traverse through, or an examination of the troubled mind of the player character. Either way it just felt like there was so little direction. Once again, I don't need to be told the answer, or even be able to figure it out, but there should be an answer, even if it will only ever be known to the author. Most importantly, for the player, there should be some sense that an answer exists, or some idea what the question might be. It's perhaps an odd nitpick, but it really felt like most stuff in the game was just there to be there, since it was impossible to imagine it serving a purpose at all, let alone speculate on what that purpose might be.

I don't think this issue actually hurts the game all that much overall, it just struck me as very odd the whole time I was playing and I wanted to talk about it.

Other Thoughts



Conclusion

NaissanceE is a cool game. I cannot pronounce the title. The gameplay certainly leaves much to be desired, but most of the environments are pretty cool and it was worth the time to explore them. It's easier to be forgiving with this game because it is short and 100% free. I would recommend this game to people who are interested in game environments, even if they aren't substantiated by much of anything but a cool soundtrack.

7/10

←Reviews