Kredolis

I enjoyed this quite a bit! It is short, but the art and story is very well done, and I think the puzzles were perfectly balanced for me. Not too tough and not too easy. I look forward to playing the next game whenever you make it!

I echo the opinions of most other reviews. The art direction and sound design are on point and the story actually being existent (unlike The Witness) was a nice surprise. Length is an issue, it takes maximum of three hours to beat and I can see people complaining about the lack of puzzles overall. The puzzles that are here are either hard *enough* too not be boring to finish or strangely obtuse.

There is also the common complaint of the game occasionally breaking after the Maglev Train. I had saved my game after taking the Maglev and returned to find both my manuel and autosave would put me under the ocean, unable to return to the lighthouse. I needed to restart the game from the beginning in order to complete it, which soured my whole experience and exposed how short this game is.

The slightest of recommendations if you're interested, but this bug and others have been highlighted for months now, with no patch, so one wonders if the devs actually care

Visually pleasing, but that's where the fun stops. The cueing on puzzles is awful. It's not indicated what puzzle interacts with what 'gate'. A lot of puzzles revolve around "As above so below" (meaning something above the puzzle will indicate the solution) - except without any indication you either need to flip, invert, or rotate that solution. One of these involved a classic "Lights Out" setup - except which "lights" activate when you flip one is completely random. It's not clever - it's just fidgety and frustrating.

Almost all the puzzles are pretty lame, mostly fall into one of these categories:

• You instantly figure it out but then spend time tediously executing the solution, or there is a number written on the wall and you need to input that number on a nearby machine (4-digit keypad, morse code puzzle, sundial clock)
• The puzzle is so obtuse you don't even know it's a puzzle, or there is an unsuspecting intractable hidden in the environment (lions eyes, fuseboxes)
• The puzzle is so cryptic you don't even understand the answer even after looking it up (seismic wave machine) (this one's probably just me being dumb idk)

The single puzzle I enjoyed solving was the underground switchboard with numbered switches. There was a clear goal, and I realised the answer is not straight-forward during my first attempt. Hopefully the sequel can include more puzzles like this (clear goal with obstacles to be considered).

Sorry, but I can't recommend this game because of just 1 enjoyable puzzle.

Game is not very good.

I ran into several bugs and when reaching the final section of the game my camera controls locked out such that my character would constantly spin. As I was unable to correct this with counter mouse inputs I decided to save and load my game to perhaps reset whatever was causing the problem with the controls, this glitched out and loaded me in outside of the map, but my control issue was resolved and after walking off the edge of the play area and falling through the kill plane below the map I was automatically teleported to the starting position of the game on the beach.

A little inconvenient you might think? WRONG
The control lock out occurred on the other side of a puzzle element which was now gone as I had completed it on this save and was not meant to be back where I was, as this game is relatively short I had no other saves and as I had just saved re-loaded my autosave had also been overwritten so short of replaying the game again from the start I was scuppered.

So in the end I watched the ending of the game on youtube, I don't feel like I missed out much. The game dumps a ton of journal entries on you at the start, too many, so I was already checked out. I will give the game credit in that you can pick up log entries and choose to play the audio component at your leisure while you're playing which at least doesn't hold up the gameplay even if the logs are quite dry and trite.

Broadly speaking the puzzles were not very stimulating with a couple that defy reasoning and the game's story is pretty dull. Would not recommend.

I was looking forward to playing this, even with a mixed review. Unfortunately the game play in incredibly laggy, even after turning all the graphics down. I barely made it off the the starting point before requesting a refund.

Played part of the game, had to stop and therefor saved the progress. Day after i wanted to continue, but loading savegame places me in the water near the beach, outside the islandmap (already mentioned bij other gamers there should be a bugfix for this, but problem still exists.) Only option is to start all over again.
Overall the game looks very nice, shame the developer hasn't fixed this bug, therefor no recommendation.

Others have said it better but puzzles are either easy to understand and solve or obtuse. Either you get them or you don't, not something you can work out on paper as you go along.

Extremely short and the ending feels both abrupt and the story simply cuts itself short because...reasons?

Cannot recommend unless you absolutely must play a new puzzle game.

I am a little surprised at the harsh criticism against Kredolis. I think many were expecting something similar to Witness and much more challenge than this game offers. Others have had issues with saving or bugs in the early days of release. I had no problems with saving or controls.
I would liken this to a walking simulator with escape room mechanics. Puzzles range from easy to obscure but all doable with some thinking. It is a short game, so buy on a deep sale as I did.
This is a tale of 2 eras where the ancient meets the modern age of the 1970s. You become shipwrecked on the island many decades later and come across the relics of both ancient and modern. The story unfolds about a ruthless Institute discovering the ruins of Atlantis and their Awakened Masters. The overseers of the Institute are willing to sacrifice the lives of scientists and workers to reach their goal. What are they really searching for?
I found it interesting that both the overseers and the Ancient Masters had that ruthless streak to get what they want, no matter the cost to others. Human nature hadn't changed over thousands of years! The story unfolds by scrolls and pieces of paper left around. They are narrated and you have the option to walk around during the spiel. The voice actors were adequate.
There are ancient puzzles to be solved and many modern mechanical pieces of equipment to get going. Some of the puzzles aren't well explained. There is one where you have to mimic a Morse code, so this is difficult for deaf or hearing impaired people. I had to look that one up.
The graphics are absolutely stunning with a Doric architectural influence. Just beautiful to walk around amongst greenery and statues interspersed here and there with the restless sound of the sea in the background. The inside of buildings were beautifully rendered. The music was unintrusive and there were plenty of natural sounds of water and birds plus all the machinery.
I quite enjoyed this gentle puzzle game with a twist at the end. Atlantis has always been an intriguing story and the game raises some interesting 'what ifs'. The world would certainly have been a different place if they had survived.
I completed this game under 4 hours, so most would finish in 2 hours. So buy on sale. I will be watching for the next game from this dev. Recommend for those who enjoy less challenging puzzle games. 8/10

This was a very strange game to me.
It did offer a beautiful scenery, at least most of the times; there were no heavy graphics or anything, but it was still quite nice to look around and maybe explore. The sound effects, music and voice acting were also surprisingly good, which is a bit rare in smaller games.
It also had puzzles.

This is where the good stuff ended. The puzzles themselves were pretty easy to complete (I daresay I spent more time trying to jump over fences, than solving them), but some of them were not logical. For example, there was a vortex that could be used to charge powercells, but I needed to place 2 powercells to get a third one. Or, I had to recreate a pattern from the ceiling on a table of sorts, but I had to flip it so that the table did not mirror the ceiling (but why?) .

Also, the whole island seemed to have inconsistencies. The game takes place in the 1970s, on an apparently abandoned island (even if for a little while), but it gives the impression that a janitor has just passed by! Some buildings are ruined, others are in a perfect condition; some old elements are Greaco-Roman, other old elements are Victorian in nature. I even found a waterwheel that ran on running water that seemed still! (and quite marshy, too).
At the end you find a girl trapped in a cage that needs a simple lever to open, only to discover that she is possibly telekinetic since she then opens a very heavy door. So, she was trapped there by someone who left the lever to her freedom just right next to her, unattended (why?)

Although I cannot recommend the game, I personally didn't have a bad time with it, but it certainly would need some more love. And a lower price, too.

This game shouldn't be as poorly optimized as this, I suffer frequent frame drops after playing for a few minutes until the frames come back after opening and closing one of the in-game menus.
The puzzles are unintuitive and you can quickly soft-lock yourself because you've used the wrong key in the wrong place and you'll be forced to start the entire game over. Except you can't, because starting a game in the 2nd or 3rd slots closes you out to a black screen which does not go away. You're forced to close the game and never return.

Not great.

If the game worked I think it would be fun. But it doesn't. If you intend to play it, set aside enough time to play the entire game in one sitting, If you save your game in either the second or third save slots, when you try to load it later you will in the water and you cannot get out. Or, If you make it to the underground areas, the mining car disappears and you can't go on anyway. I don't see any patches on the Steam site so I guess I'll wait until they become available. Buy it and try it at your own risk. Very disappointed.

I really wanted to like this game, and it visually is very appealing, however the puzzle design is greatly lacking. It is much more on the level of flash point and click game's of the 00's than any good modern puzzle game. Would work better as a walking sim than a puzzle game tbh

Really good puzzle game. It's a bit short considering the price of the game but in the end it's really good. The graphics are amazing and the puzzles are not too difficult but not too easy either. Would recommend!

Such an amazing game. Puzzles were moderate to easy, story is a bit short but really set it up for a potential future release. Graphics and music was fantastic.

Worth the price even for 2-3 hours of gameplay.

Style resembles The Witness. Gameplay resembles Myst.
Puzzles are very easy at first, but absurdly obscure later. Some of don't make any sense.
The story not is really engaging or believable, and falls apart right when you are presented with the nuke bomb...
Last encounter is very awkward...

I don't think it worth the price, to be completely fair.

Really good game. The visuals are incredibly beautiful, the sounds are immersive. I sank headlong into it for several hours. The puzzles are great, not too hard, but not too easy either. It was a lot of fun to solve them, although not always the first time!

Most of all I liked the story. Intriguing and interesting until the very end. She grabs you and doesn't let go. Oh yeah!!

You need to spend a couple of hours in Kredolis. Trust me.

I was looking forward to this game, but unfortunately I cannot recommend it. I completely beat the game in 2 hours, and the puzzles were not very engaging. Although I love the world design and the art, there just wasn't enough in story or the puzzles to justify the price for me. Additionally, there was a completely game breaking bug right before the end where getting out of the mag train my camera was spinning and I lost control of the cursor and couldn't move. I reloaded the game and it had me out in the ocean. I had to completely delete all of my saves from my localrow folder and restart.

It wasn't a bad game, but I would say worth $10 at maximum and don't have too high of hopes.

The story is interesting at first but the end feels slapped together and then just a bit confusing and awkward. The final encounter was a big let down.

Steam Deck performance at launch is unplayable. I have requested a refund, fully intending to repurchase the game if or when game becomes Steam Deck compatible. Disappointed that game isn’t optimized better.

It's a pretty game. Puzzles are okay, some are more clever than others, some make more sense than others. A few had to be forced. But made by one guy, I'd say it's an achievement. I appreciated the Riven reference, I noticed it the second I saw that minecart track. And maybe a Quern reference with the chairs by the underwater window towards the end near the deluge?

Unfortunately, my view got stuck on the tram switch and was locked, so I couldn't watch the tram ride. That was a bummer.

The game is just barely worth a playthrough if you're really interested, but it's not worth $20. I would maybe recommend buying it on sale for like $5. The puzzles were not very engaging; as someone else pointed out, they are extremely easy in the beginning and then become strangely obscure later, with little to no sense of continuity between the puzzle mechanics. The story was also not engaging, which is unfortunate because the aesthetics/theme of the game offer a great potential base for world-building. On top of that, the game is pretty short (edit: I have 5 hours on record, but that's including time wasted on a save that I had to restart due to a bug, plus time spent AFK on an obnoxious puzzle that I didn't want to even try to solve).

Erm, little on the fence, it was fun, just story was in rambles and little too short for the price. However I suppose good effort I guess for everything else.

I really wanted to give Kredolis a try hoping it was akin to games like the Myst series and The Witness (honestly it's literally got a Myst lighthouse and the graphical style similar to The Witness which I love), it's been sitting in my wish list for a while. But the combination of near linear series of puzzles, and puzzles that range from extremely simple (hunt for the randomly but obviously placed and easy to see because they're out of place hints to enter into a keypad) to extreme precision hard (using really unintuitive interaction controls pixel perfect line up the things to a marker that is very very hard to see), contributed to me moving away from the game after an hour.

The real frustration for me was that there's no option to invert vertical mouse input. And I was surprised that there was no controller support, we're in 2022 and there's a very obvious land grab with the Steam Deck and living room couch gaming (which is where I was playing this game). I switched over to using Steam's built-in controller support with the default gamepad config to gain inverted camera input (again 2022, the publisher at the very least could have provided an official controller config within Steam's community presets list).

Even with tweaks to the control config (thank you Valve) a mouse is needed to deal with the inventory system that could just be replaced with a simple "look at key hole, insert key you already have" instead of dragging and dropping from the inventory. To exacerbate things, [spoiler]there's a follow a maze while you race a timer puzzle[spoiler] that I had to eventually switch back to a mouse and keyboard in order to finish in time because it was impossible to do fast enough with a controller (and all this while trying to remember vertical mouse input wasn't inverted).

The game is super pretty, I will give it that. Applause to the person/team running art direction. And extra points for the voice overs, my dyslexia thanks you.

I think with some polish to the game's controls and puzzle difficulty in Kredolis could bring some shine to the game. I don't know if puzzles are still linear after the first hour, but that's a harder thing to address.

Incredibly underwhelming from what looked like a nice aesthetically pleasing puzzle game.

Off the bat, the performance is incredibly ropey. I immediately had to downgrade to MEDIUM settings (i9-9900, GTX 2070S) because high settings would only get me 45-50fps. The artistic design is very nice and pleasing to look at and the music is quite calming and peaceful but it's constantly interrupted by the excessively loud footstep sounds. The mouse controls are also irritating a lot of the time when using the mouse to pull/push items. The "hand" cursor needs to be smaller to, it often obscures things you're interacting with.

As for the puzzles, 90% of the game is incredibly simple and just a matter of "look at clue, input clue" done and dusted. But then a few of the puzzles are SO obtuse and unnecessarily obscure on the matter of how to solve them.

All in all, incredibly overpriced considering the length (approx 2 hours), performance and simplicity.

ALSO WORD OF WARNING FOR ANY DEAF GAMERS: One of the puzzles in this game relies quite heavily on sound cues so be warned.

This game looked promising with Myst-like puzzles, The Witness-like graphics and storytelling similar to The Talos Principle, but the puzzles felt either too easy or obtuse and uninspired, making you question what you're supposed to do as opposed to how to do it, the story fell flat and barely lasted 2 hours. I'm not a fan of the fake Greek lettering mixed with Roman numerals either.
I could not recommend this game at a price of 10€, let alone 20.

I was looking forward to a new puzzle game in the Myst genre, but this missed the mark and seemed rushed to be published when more work was needed. If you can look past the few bugs like random color splotches that are out-of-place and transport systems seeming to leave without you causing you to need to reload the game, this could be a good title except that it was pretty short and only was challenging when applying the solution required more guidance.

The puzzle elements were lacking in creativity and when I got stuck, it was because the answer was randomly reflected, inverted, or not aligned as was specifically chosen by the programmer. Additionally, there was no puzzle that utilized any past elements besides your personal inventory of batteries. So despite being able to travel to every location you previously explored, there was no need to ever return. The first puzzle had a good element of following cables to find the connection to power a device, but that was quickly abandoned then after as a mechanic. Another example, you have to charge a few batteries at one point, and I thought that this was the opportunity to use the hydroelectric generator discovered an hour earlier, but nope, you just needed to plug them into a charger sitting on a desk you happen to be at.

Story was interesting, but seemed rushed to a climax. At such climax you end up going DOWN an elevator which triggers a cinematic where you are going UP in an elevator to a bizarre conclusion. Honestly, at first I thought they were going with a concussion-induced dream ending, but no they really went in a direction that didn't seem very rewarding or desiring more.

The game is pretty and all, but the story is kind of strange and actions doesn't always make sense.
The puzzles are mostly very childish and the solution is almost always spelled out for you.
The only trouble this game will give you is when mechanics are not explained for you,
Like when you spend 99% of the time clicking levers and buttons with the mouse, but suddenly you have to operate a lever with the W key... took longer to figure that one out than any of the puzzles in the game.

Super reminiscent of Myst. The puzzles were pretty uneven. Some were very clever others were bizarre. But overall the presentation was a master class. The ambiance was comparable to Myst but with a stronger sense of place without losing any of the surreal wonder that I would consider a hallmark of that game.

I'd strongly recommend this game. Be prepared for some frustrating patches, and be sure to check your environment thoroughly, even if it doesn't make intuitive sense. Overall the experience is worthwhile and impressive.

I'm sure this is a lovely game, and I was very much looking forward to it.

However... I admit I run a slightly older laptop but I have never had any issues with graphics heavy games before. Games like The Witness, Superliminal, and Call of the Sea are smooth as butter. But no matter what settings I chose, I had problems with the controls. Movement was choppy, and the in-game menu wouldn't respond 9/10 times I clicked on the book. This made the game sadly unplayable for me. I'll wait to see if there are any updates over the next few days that might fix it, but I don't hold out much hope.

I'm sure other people will love it though! If it's compatible with their setup.

I liked the game, it had some fun puzzles. Nothing particularly challenging, a couple of puzzles weren't well signposted and took a couple tries to understand what it wanted me to do.

The story is pretty short, and the price is a little steep for so ~2h of content. If it goes on sale, give it a go.

-The open-world environment is beautiful. Colorful, lush, and a joy to look at and wander through.
-Quite a bit of puzzle solving is required to complete this short-ish game, some of it obtuse but not all of it was difficult. Besides, there are walkthroughs and hints online (Steam or youtube, etc) if you get stuck. I would say it took me about 2+ hours from start to finish, maybe more because I didn't want to depend on walkthroughs. I HAD to rely on a WT for one of the puzzles.
-Voice acting for the most part was well-casted.
-Incidental music (thematical or otherwise) was appropriate, though somewhat sparsely threaded.
-The DEV(s) have patched some issues, most notably getting the 3 "save-boxes" (for manual save locations) to work (they were not working at release). Of importance is that, currently, the game auto-saves not where you quit out, but at the physical area where your most recent puzzle was solved, so if some progress was made since your last puzzle was solved but a new puzzle has not been solved yet, you'll lose that progress if you quit before solving the "next" puzzle. But the game is not overly long, and the puzzles are frequent enough that not much progress will BE lost if you have to quit between puzzle solving.
-I'm all for supporting indie DEVs, especially if they create games this lush-looking, but there are quite a few people complaining about the game's cost vs. game-finishing time. I frankly don't think $20 is a lot for a well-crafted and gorgeous game that makes you think. But I DO wish game DEVs would craft the ability to manually save during a game; that seems to be less and less in the era of console ports now, but SOME DEVs program in manual save slots in THEIR indie games. I hope DEVs realize that there is a large segment of older adventure gamers (such as myself) who can't spend hours on a PC at a stretch without being able to save or quit out.
-I think this game was worth the money. I love the lore of Atlantis, etc. This game is one that feeds that need. PLus, as mentioned, the art style and environment was worth the money alone.

I really enjoyed my time on Kredolis. The artstyle is beautiful and cozy, the puzzles had me thinking but never to the point where it got frustrating. The foreshadowing with the burning lighthouse also had me intrigued to get in there and find out what happened.
It was all over a bit too fast though because I wanted more :)