This was a puzzle game that I loved, in spite of the puzzles themselves often being mediocre or outright boring. L&LE is so effortlessly carried by its chic style and above all its endlessly exciting atmosphere of mystery - I just wish that I didn't feel so let down so often by the puzzles that I found and solved.

Incredibly, incredibly stressful
(but also oh my god so fun)

I have absolutely loved this game - it has been such a pleasure to be within its world, seeing its sights and hearing its sounds.

King's Field is a cited influence on this game for very good reason. If you have not played a ps1-era dungeon crawler "action" RPG, then your expectations may not align with what this game really is. This is more a game about exploration than the mechanics of combat, which ties it to a lineage more akin of dungeon crawlers than Dark Souls. (This is also true of its world structure, which is closer to the relatively self-contained, stand-alone zones of Verdite than the interweaving of Lordran.) One thing I will say for the oldheads: there is a certain level of "video game" pastiche that took some adjustment to, but I felt that it lessened as the game went on.

Again, if you approach this game as it is, rather than thinking of it as Another Dark Souls, I simply cannot recommend it enough.

Lloyd Bannings, Ace Defective

I felt that this game held a lot of promise, but didn't live up to the expectations it set for itself. I will say I enjoyed some of the character themes explored, if not the character writing itself so much. The role of one particular character dooming himself to yet again be a "bystander" was something I found really compelling! Others have written about the repetition of the puzzles, which I found true but is admittedly subjective. (There's only so many ways to utilize a four digit code.) But I think I can identify a few broader design issues that hamper the game.

The game sells itself on its open world - but it cares very little about the open world as a space in and of itself. Early on there are some great moments, of trying to piece together where someone's address or home may be. But the illusion of the town as a space falls apart when you are explicitly assured by the developer that there are only about 4 spaces within the town that you actually need to worry about. Learning about the environment of the town plays very little into the puzzles that the game wants you to solve.
In fact, attempting to glean information about the world will most likely simply set you up for frustration. You may know where a particular tool is, having pieced together its history of ownership. But until you find the key to access the key which will give you access to the key that will open the way to where you want to be, it does not help you to know where it is. And once you do find the final, ultimate key you need, the game will explicitly inform you as to where it goes. You may calculate and notice the location of a secret room - but again, until you find a key in a completely different location, you will have no luck. This ultimately feeds into my second point:

Part of my frustration with the game may be due to its reputation and presentation as a "detective" game. This genre, while hardly nascent, has had somewhat of an indie game renaissance within recent years. As an avid lover of mystery novels and games, I think the hallmark of the genre is "synthesis of information." By piecing together information, motives, assumptions, you can create the dopamine hit of understanding something that isn't made plain by what is presented to you. Very often, making these connections doesn't actually relate to the puzzles it makes you do. Identifying the killer will not be the thing to get you the key that opens the door to the finale. I will grant that sometimes knowing individual's relationships can give you a clue to what a code might be - but even the execution of this feels clumsy and starts to wear. Again, there are only so many ways to make a calendar date into a numeric code.

Despite its flaws (which there are plenty of) I enjoyed exploring this eerie, beautiful world. Do not expect "superior gunplay" or what even really may be considered a... well, ending.

A delightful detective game that manages to tell an interesting story with its vignettes. Though I would recommend it, I would say that I was often a little underwhelmed by the mysteries themselves. I would excitedly work through the elements building up to the final conclusion, only to find that the actual answer itself was more simple than I had imagined. Even the conclusive final puzzle - rather than a deep mystery to dig into, there are rather just multiple relatively simple murders to solve. Still, it was fun to play and had a few moments of "Ah-hah!" I just felt that the potential of the early sections of the game (for instance, Case 4) wasn't fulfilled by the later half.

It's hard to put a finger on what makes this game so enjoyable; if I had to boil it down into something simple, it would be that everything simply falls into step - the writing, art, mechanics, music. It's also a rare occurrence to come across a game that feels so personal. I wholly recommend The Void Rains Upon Her Heart, and will be looking forward to everything these devs make in the future.