I got through this one in about 15 minutes. That, I guess, is if you don’t count the five solid minutes I stared at the first room thinking, “What is my goal here?”
The Guardian is a game where you wander across fantasy landscapes while pining for your lost love. The goal of the game is to cross across all of that, pick up an item, and drop it in a place close to the room you started from. I managed to walk exactly to the right place and do the right thing without any digressions or wrong paths. The goal isn’t super well-cued by the game, but it does have pieces of broken blue marble in one room and a larger piece in the other, so it made sense to match them, and it’s not really very easy to stray off the path that it gives you. The task done, the game said that I won, which felt pretty abrupt. I was left feeling…. “Wait, is that it?”
The game says I scored 90 out of 100 points. That isn’t so much through puzzle solving or cleverness. The game just drops big amounts of points on you for doing basically nothing, including entering rooms. I didn’t really want to go back for the other 10 points, but I did anyway just for completion’s sake and they are also just for entering rooms off of the main “quest.”
If I sound unimpressed, I guess I was! The only thing that that seemed to make this a game rather than just something I read, is not having any idea what my goal was when it first fired up. To me not really knowing what my motivation is, other than vague reminiscence, is not interesting. I also thought the prose was a bit purple at times.
I guess it’s just really hard to make me care about the past relationship between two kind of non-specific people. However, the game is technically fine…. I might drop the points system, since it really doesn’t add anything and in fact confusedly detracts at times. If the game is supposed to be about exploring it feels strange to drop points on you for places you should be motivated to go on your own.
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