Caracal Continuum

Challenging at times. Good visuals that make you want to take plenty of screenshots. No dialogue but it won’t hinder you. Puzzles get a little repetitive and force you to run back and forth quite a bit. I found myself getting stuck on the landscape and having a tough time with the “physics based” puzzles because the engine doesn’t seem to be built around physics but you can limp your way through them. Controls are not optimized and annoyed me. Animal animation has a lot of love and care put into it and is genuinely beautiful. The whole game is kind of a trippy and confusing experience. If it’s on sale or if you really want it, get it.

Odd story about two lesbians that overthrow an Aztec kingdom, with a Hindu-ish fictional belief system, but everyone has a vaguely European accent. Main character is silent due to being a reincarnated wolf and the other is an annoying ball of light that is constantly confused. The world is large but linear. There are many collectibles in the world yet there’s little to no incentive to collect them. You just want to get to the end as quickly as possible. Graphics are fair but look a bit generic. Story is confusing and weirdly anti-religion but still obsesses over “spirituality” and “possession”. I found myself skipping cutscenes due to how long it took them to tell the story, the cutscenes are mainly still-images that fade in and out. If you choose to sit through them, you’ll be staring at one still image with only music. Oh don’t get me wrong, there are voice actors in these cutscenes but for some reason they will stop speaking for what feels like 10 seconds at a time during these story cutscenes so you’ll be staring at a still image with no narration before it changes. Now let’s talk about the voice acting... the “ball of light” is very annoying, his voice actor sounds like he doesn’t want to wake up his parents in the next room. All of the other voices were ok I guess. The lines written for the “ball of light” sound as if he’s faking surprise extremely often, or he’s trying to act ignorant to what is happening. I’m not sure who’s fault this is. The world feels like a hallway but there’s no going backwards and there’s only one way forward. It’s extremely hard to believe a world that is designed to get you from point A to point B. This game feels like someone said “hey! Why don’t we make a game where you can change into any animal???” But no one knew how to make it work properly. Instead of really sitting down and seeing how other games or media make something like this work, “Mooneye” just said “well wolf special because magic, wolf not allowed in heaven because she bad! Wolf woman rebel against kingdom because (generic reason)!”. They also tried to be super progressive and “challenge” society somehow and I’m not sure what the message was supposed to be. It’s also odd that the main character was lesbian and her partner had hardly any role in the story sadly. Her small role in the story makes it seem as if “Mooneyes” wanted to be woke and virtue signal. You end up not caring about the main character’s loss (her partner) because you are barely introduced to her, she could’ve been used to show the softer side of the main character. You also don’t care about the “ball of light” because you just met him. Wish I could get my money back but Sony doesn’t do refunds. I could’ve bought something for my dog and gotten more satisfaction from that. The game is 6 hours long but feels much longer because not one minute was memorable or fun. $30.00 USD is way too much for this game, I would’ve felt a lot more comfortable if the game was $10.00 at most. I’ve never been so disappointed.