Río Alto: Forgotten Memories

I played this game through to a death after about 30 minutes.

You play a man who has recently moved to a small town with wells, town doctors, taverns, etc.

The interface is wild. On the left is an illustrated book, with lines in slow typewriter text appearing as you make choices. You have three categories of 'inventory': thoughts, places, and things. These appear in the lower right.

The upper right contains the contents of your current location.

Actions are done by dragging inventory onto each other.

It's a good mechanic. It's slow, though, as is the typewriter text. And the game is long. And I couldn't find any way to save, and there are insta-deaths.

So I'm going to keep my rating and review as it is and maybe one day revisit this game. A save feature would help a lot!

The narrative and mechanics were engaging enough to draw me in after the first few minutes. There are multiple endings. I only realised that the red cards were meant to be "solved" after completing about 60-70% of the game. Ended up "restarting the day" some ten times and managed to solve 5 out of the 6 cards, with still a 71-74% completion rate which was admittedly frustrating. (Spoiler - click to show)I am not sure if the Basement is supposed to be a location card (which would make it the 13th of 15 locations)...? I felt that technically it should be the case, but it appears at the top half rather than in the Locations section.

The implementation bugs ruined a huge part of the experience for me - it is annoying when you had played through to 70% only for the text to be truncated, the links to not display properly, or (Spoiler - click to show)after Felisa wakes up and gets a stroke of sorts, her character card disappears and it's not possible to continue - I was forced to restart the game several times because of these glitches since it did not have a save and load feature.

Overall, I really enjoyed investigating the mystery but towards the end I had no choice but to give up because the bugs appear to make it impossible to complete.