Recorded

This game is almost ritualistic in nature, and I enjoyed it. The gameplay consists almost entirely of reading messages placed in each of about 12 rooms. Doing this unlocks the final step.

Everything is dreamlike in nature, a bit like Plotkin's Dreamhold, but on a smaller scale. You wake up with no voice in front of a locked door In a dark structure with symbolic rooms, some made of glass, others of iron, etc.

I'm always into this kind of game, so I had fun. However, this game is really only for fans of the genre. Intentionally few puzzles, and the story is mostly about cool atmosphere.

An escape game - well, in a loose sense of the word - where you have to get out from a series of surreal, weird rooms. The overall feel of the game reminded me of Mateusz Skutnik’s Submachine games, especially the more abstract ones. Unlike Skutnik’s Submachine, though, the rooms in Recorded lacked an overarching theme, or a repeating motif - something stylistic which would have made it clearer that this was the work of one entity/being/person, and ultimately created a stronger storyline.

One problem is that there’s not much in the way of story, or puzzle. What story there is is delivered through cryptic messages, though they often felt more like flavour text - purposeless, and not hinting much at what the story was. I felt like this opportunity to build a distinct NPC had been wasted, and it’s a pity.

As far as I can tell, there was one puzzle, and it was of the ‘pick up this object and put it there’ variety. Not exactly the most inspired of puzzles, unfortunately, and it was not clear to me how to trigger the appearance of the object that I needed to solve the one puzzle (I used the walkthrough).

Recorded has the beginning of what might have been a very interesting concept in the game, but it might have gone way over my head, or it was never developed.