Number of Reviews: 10
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really well-built, cohesive and immersive wide world , April 1, 2023(Bashes in the door) I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS ON THIS ONE HOLY SHIT.
First off- ALLLL the points for worldbuilding. Like… holy mcfuckin shit. Holy shit. Wayfarers, Lacuna, rayfish, sculptures, ink, word day, berries, forests, trees, colours- Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding!!!!! I’ll say it so so so many times!!!! It’s so cool!
(Sigh). My writer's brain is so happy right now.
Anyway. Anyway. Anyway! Suuuuuper big world. So much to explore. And explore you do! So much lore. You’re not on a time crunch (which is refreshing), ie you can have dreams, you can sleep, it’s kind of like a simulation but so definitely, definitely not.
Ough. I couldn’t put this one down. I skipped several classes (not physically, just didn’t do shit) to play this. And I normally do that for IF games, but this one was especially gravitational.
Mechanics… from the way you interact with the story (typing the words which are ever so kindly colour-coded into locations, topics, and observable things) to the actual actions you do (swimming in lagoons, fixing stations, dancing [kind of], exploring volcanoes), this was a truly revolutionary turning point in interactive fiction. One of the longest (free) interactive fiction games out there, Blue Lacuna spans at over… 400k.
I did get softlocked for a bit (fortunately, they did have an option to kinda hack it; the god command). But once we got back, we kept going.
Plot! From the opening scene, I was faced with moral dilemmas at every. Fckin. Turn. I cried, like, 7 minutes into the game. It really says a lot about me, huh, that I choose emotions and people over anything else. The feels I felt. Jeez.
I haven’t done all the endings yet, but I was very content with my own ending. I got my closure with several characters, and it was a beautiful start to an end to a start.
Peaceful, beautiful descriptions. No way of killing yourself (dangit) and an incredibly polite game. Like, I said “please”, and it said ‘I appreciate your politeness, but the game works better if…’, and when I said ‘die’, to see if I could kill myself [spoiler, I couldn’t], it said “I’m sorry if you’re feeling frustrated. If you want to, at any point you can SAVE and close the game, and RESTORE to come back at a later date’. It was so sweet. And it had a sing response. It was really nice.
I would totally play this game again. Especially with a soundtrack. Whimsical, fantastical, amazing plot. Puzzles were great as well- very trial and error, but in a fun way. And once you’d puzzled them out, they stayed open (and some even gave you hints!). The NPC (cackles) was. Very awesome as well. Great characterisation!! So cool backstory!! Very fun. I definitely needed a parental figure, yeah. He called me ‘duckling’ and I fucking crumbled into a sobbing heap.
And… Rume. I both love/hate the detail that, (Spoiler - click to show)uh… as you go on in the story, you can’t cry over them. It was… heartbreaking. It hurt. But I was so engrossed.
Anyway! Deducting a bit because of the lack of hint-system [in the game] together with softlocking, but it’s a chip off the overall gloriousness of Blue Lacuna.
I would definitely recommend this. Maybe not for your first ever IF game, but still worth playing for everyone.