I've had my eyes on RiME back in 2017 when it was released, but a lot of games together with a bit of negative reviews on the games, especially the switch version, kept me from it. Until now when it was relatively cheap. What caught my eye was that it gave me some Mysterious Cities of Gold vibes, and maybe the clothes of the boy since it looked like Estabans clothes. It took me 5 hours to play through it once, and I gotta say. I really enjoyed it. It's basically an adventure with platforming elements. Story is that this boy have washed up on some island with ruins of a lost civilisation with some technological marvels together with some mystical magic around the island. There is no dialog so what you see and observe with your own senses is what you get out the story. First of you awaken some kind of magical fox that was trapped in some statue and leads you across the adventure. You will see a man in a red cloak similar to your own scrap of cape, meeting some kind of machine eyes on bipedal legs that will help you on your journey. Beyond these friendly characters you have some shadow creatures that seems afraid of you in one chapter, then attacks you and tries to drain your life and then ends just looking at you. And then we have the monstrous pterodactyl that hunts you if you go out in the open until you fry it with summoning a cloud of lightning from several windmills scattered across a plain.
So you gotta solve puzzles like moving boxes into place to reach higher places, align shadows to touch or not touch light sensitive buttons to open doors, and all you gotta get with context cues. It's nice to feel smart some times, didn't use a guide (like that would be an achievement am I right?). So if it's this good, why wasn't it recieved better? Well, the switch port was apparently at launch a disaster since the frame-rate was horrendous, the game would chug at crucial times and apparently felt unplayable. They fixed a lot of those, but when I notice, at the very first screen part of the background blinks in and out, then I can see some people finding it really bad. Still chugs at times and I got stuck on a branch in the first 15 minutes of the game so I needed to restart to the nearest check-point. But I liked it.
Spoilers for those who cares about that, or want to experience it for themselves. In between what I would classify as chapters you get some flashbacks it turns out. First you are on a ship that looks stranded in snow, but as you follow your red cloth to it and as you climb the ship it disappears and your are on the open sea and storm clouds comes upon you. The next vision is you looking through the ship at sea. Next vision is doing it again, but this time trying to reach the man clad in the red mantle you've seen across the island as the storm rocks the boat and he falls of and while the boy tries to drag him up you will see that it's just a shadow with the mantle draped over him. The mantle rips and leaves the boy with his scarf or whatever you would call it. And then the final vision hits. The roles are switched, it's the man trying to reach the boy as he falls off in his raincoat, and the raincoat rips as the boy disappear in the ocean. The game gets really surreal at this point. Right before the vision it went from bright to darkness with constant rain. The machines you resurrected sacrificed themselves one by one to open the doors so you could reach a statue with a crying child that looks like the boy where the fox disappears, and the boy is turned to some sand statue, and after breaking free is also a shadow with white glowing eyes as he climbs a lighthouse and lights it. He ends up in a room, walks through a corridor and sees the man from the boat, sitting as a sand statue and touching destroys it, transporting the child to a whirlpool that the shadows jumps into, and then he follows. Which changes the story to the man, as he looks through his sons toys and seeing a vision of his dead son.
Fantastic. Apparently the games chapters is based on the five stages of grief and the twist over who was going through the stages are fantastic. Also that I empathised so much with the machines that helped you and then died was also rather heavy on the heart. Would I compare the game it probably has taken inspiration from Ico (which I've never played, I got stuck on Shadow of the Colossus while playing through the Ico Collection on PS3). As said, it took me 5 hours, but I wasn't that thorough since I missed a lot of collectibles, like the keyholes that I assume tells the story of the boys family. I checked if there was an alternate ending and there is. If you find 4 white shades you get a bit more, I found one. Being 5 hours it's not impossible that I run through it again. I can understand locking progress between chapters, but making it impossible to walk back through a door or jumping down from a plateau in the same chapter feels rather irritating. Still, well worth a play, but maybe not the switch version due to the still lingering graphics hiccups.
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