Sunset Over Savannah

This is one of those games that makes you feel great after finishing it... with the help of a walkthrough. Unfortunately, no amount of verbose prose and wonderful descriptions of a setting that I can immediately transport myself to can make up for a lack of purpose.

When the game begins, you are contemplating quitting your job. Here's where the first branch of the storyline could begin, depending on your own perspective. Is the game about convincing yourself to remain employed, or to realize that you should quit? You don't really know enough about the character to make a well-informed decision, and so instead... you follow your hunger to a snack bar and buy some boiled peanuts.

From that point on, the game expects you to know what to do next. Stumbling around the beach, you can find a lot of shells (Spoiler - click to show)that are never important, really and a few nice sand sculptures. You're introduced to a species of glass mite that, to my knowledge, don't exist in reality, so I suppose the player could start to infer that they're living in an alternate/fantasy world.

But again, you're just making assumptions. After a few more laps around the beach without making any kind of progress, I decided to check out the in-game hints. From there, I read the answer to the question 'What are my goals?'. Four or five hints later, I realized that there were a series of random astonishing events that you needed to experience. Since the most interesting thing I had discovered up to that point was a meticulously crafted castle of glass, I decided to find a walkthrough. When I witnessed the first event, it became clear that the character needed to be convinced to quit their job, but I had already stopped caring about the character's intentions and decided to just see how the puzzles played out.

And they were wonderful - not too challenging, not too simple. There were a few leaps of logic to be made, and again, some "magic" is involved. Even though I didn't believe in the goal of the game, I still found some delight in seeing it play out. There are very few mechanical flaws, if any, and aside from not being able to interact with any of the NPCs you find on the beach, the game responded to a lot of poking and prodding around.

In the end, the only reason I awarded it 4 stars instead of 5 is that the journey was delightful, but I didn't know how or why to start it.