Recent reviews by Caeler

Root Letter takes an intriguing setup about a pen pal from the past and quickly becomes mediocre due to a repetitive story structure and lackluster gameplay.

The story starts out interesting enough. The main character had a pen pal named Aya 15 years ago who abruptly stopped responding to his letters. In the present, he finds a new letter that prompts him to look into the past. He heads to the town Aya lived in and begins investigating using information from the letters. He quickly discovers that the person he's looking for died 25 years ago. But if Aya died 25 years ago, who was he exchanging letters with? The setup for the story is engaging, but unfortunately, it's downhill from here.

The plot advances in the most frustratingly formulaic way possible. Aya's seven former classmates hold the keys to unlock the past. Discover who they are, question them and get rejected, figure out how to get them to talk to you, and then question them again. They'll give you a meager amount of new information about Aya and a clue to who one of the other classmates is. Rinse and repeat each chapter with a new classmate until the story approaches its conclusion.

Does the main character ever investigate and discover anything on his own? Nope. Aya's classmates tell him everything he needs to know. All the answers are just handed to him on a silver platter. The people he talks to just give away tons of information that they know they shouldn't.

In terms of gameplay, Root Letter is a typical VN with some investigative elements. You can move around from location to location and inspect objects. You can talk to people, show them items, ask them questions, or have your character think to himself. There's not a whole lot to talk about here.

Every chapter of the game features an investigative section where you question one of Aya's classmates, but none of these sections are particularly interesting; Each one starts and ends the same. The person you are questioning denies that they're the person you think they are, and by the end of the investigation you reveal that they are, in-fact, the person you think they are. This contributes to how formulaic the story feels.

There are eight core chapters, and each ending has two unique chapters. At the start of each chapter, the main character reads a letter he received from Aya 15 years ago and remembers the letter he wrote in response. You are prompted to determine part of his response. Choices include things like "I want to learn more about history" and "Do you like black hair?" These responses are not any deeper than they appear on the surface and feel very insignificant for how much influence they have over the ending.

Usually, there are multiple choices when talking to people but only one that actually moves the story forward. This isn't necessarily bad on its own, and a lot of games do this. Combined with the letters, however, the investigations feel like they have no impact on the story being told. After the eighth chapter, you will be switched to one of five endings based entirely on how you chose to respond to Aya's letters.

Only two of the game's endings make any sense, and one of them is just a worse version of the true ending. The three other endings take the less grounded aspects of the story and present them as though they are actual solutions to the central mystery, even though they don't really fit well with the rest of the narrative. The writer should have just made one ending and called it a day. The extra endings add nothing to the narrative except aliens, and the true ending is the only one that's fleshed out well enough to serve as a conclusion to the story.

To summarize, Root Letter fails to live up to its initial promise. It offers no meaningful decision-making, a formulaic structure, middling plot and gameplay, and multiple endings that make no sense. If you're looking for a compelling mystery, avoid this; There are better alternatives.

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It's Skyrim

The more friends you have the longer the puzzles take to solve

Poppo always wins.

A fun game reminiscent of Minecraft but with a greater emphasis on combat. The game still receives free content updates from time to time despite being released over five years ago. The extra content keeps the game fresh and adds greater replayability. Terraria can keep you entertained for countless hours and is worth, in my opinion, far more than its listed price.

Don't let the reviews fool you. This is not a good puzzle game.

GOOD

• The puzzle pieces differ in size and shape from typical pieces. This adds a lot of variety to how connecting pieces can be approached.

NEUTRAL

• The music is ok, but repetitive. Some of the sounds get annoying after a while.
  
  
• The art is alright.
  
  
• Unique "river system" designed to disperse puzzle pieces. It had a lot of potential but is ruined by design choices and bugs described below.

BAD

• Grabbing and dropping a piece in the river will return it to an area at the left, instead of where you drop it.
  
  
• Picking a piece from the river will sometimes grab multiple pieces from the river. If this happens, all pieces are forcibly dropped and returned to the left side of the river. (Bug?)
  
  
• Pieces in the river can float over and cover one other, making it impossible to find the piece that you're looking for. This becomes increasingly problematic on larger puzzles, and is exacerbated by the previous two points.
  
  
• Clicking seems to be a bit inaccurate. Clicking directly on a piece in the river will sometimes grab a nearby piece instead of the one you wanted. This could be because of the overlapping.
  
  
• Pieces cannot be connected until they are placed in the correct location. Finding two pieces that fit together effectively does nothing because they can't be connected until a spot for one or the other is found. Leaving them on the board until then covers up other spots. Returning them back to the river presents the issue of having to find the matching piece(s) again.
  
  tl;dr It could have been great, but bad design made the gameplay tedious and annoying.