Gaming Ether One Review

inb4 rants about BT reviewers passing comments about being an idiot if you decide to vote UKIP

 

I'm not going to rant, but I don't think political comments need to be in BT reviews.

One other thing I'm not going to do... vote UKIP.

 

vote nha party

 

Put power in the hands of Racists and Bigots - vote UKIP.

/troll

On topic - I'd not heard of this game until the review. Colour me intrigued.

 

Well Said Dave, Hmm that game sounds interesting Ill take a look at that

 

The game is great. Worthy of your hard earned cash

 

Just finished playing Ether One and it was a rather frustrating experience, not because of the puzzles, that's why I play this type of game, but because the game is quite buggy.

A number of updates have been released for the game on GOG where I bought it, but there are still a few big issues with the game, firstly, I had completed some sections in the industrial centre to restore the projectors and the appropriate lights have lit up on the area board, but when I returned to the same area later on some of the lights are turned off and the projectors are incomplete and I have to redo the same tasks and puzzles again, very annoying

The second big issue with the game is when restoring an area, you use an artifact that you find to physically rebuild some broken areas in the game, this allows you to reach areas that were previously inaccessible, again for some reason, when returning to some restored areas they are broken again but if you try and restore the same area again it breaks the game, the whole screen shakes and your cursor becomes very slow and unresponsive, also hitting 'T' to return to your case has no effect, you can only get out of this by loading a previous save or quitting the game.

These problems are exasperated by the fact that by their very nature exploration/puzzle games often lead you to go over the same ground a few times, (often many times!) especially when you are stuck and trying to figure out what to do next, so having to do the same things again but still not progress in the game is infuriating.

Finally, when you have completed a puzzle in a game the components involved in that puzzle should then be dead, inert, un-clickable, because if they are not and still appear active, (clickable) you can wrongly assume that they are still part of the game for some reason and just waste time trying to work them into something, many items and areas in Ether One are still active despite having being used in a puzzle and no longer needed, this is a real time waster and added to my frustration and lack of trust in the game, by that I mean you have to believe that the game is working correctly, I often felt like I was fighting the game and wasn't sure if I was just wasting my time doing something.

An interesting game concept, but if I'm unfortunate enough to develop dementia I think the issues with Ether One may well have contributed to it.

 

Ether One has been updated on GOG which should fix the issues which really spoiled the game for me.