Addie no Okurimono - To Moze from Addie (Playstation)

 It feels bad to have to give a negative review to what is obviously a good game, but that's what I'm going to have to do here. There's so much about Addie no Okurimono - To Moze from Addie that's really high quality, a lot of cool and interesting ideas executed well, but the problem is that I just really don't enjoy playing it at all. It starts off at a disadvantage, being an adventure game, a genre I rarely get along with well.

 

In its favour, though, it's not an adventure game of the "completely illogical object puzzle" type. Instead, all the puzzles centre around a device called the LogLock, which is made up of a bunch of wheels that have the alphabet printed on them. The wheels can be manipulated in various ways: thhat can be swapped around, the letters can be flipped and rotated, and so on. Each puzzle tasks you with changing one word into another, utilising a certain number of moves or fewer. For some reason, the tutorial puzzles the game starts you off with are much stricter regarding move limits than the puzzles you'll tackle in the story, to the point that I came pretty close to just quitting at that point.
 

When you actually get into the story itself (which I think takes place in your dream?), then not only do the puzzles get easier, but they lose a bit of their abstraction, too. For when you solve a puzzle in the story, you're not just changing one word to another, but doing the same to actual objects! For eample, the first two puzzles you encounter have you turning a cage into a bell, so that the boy trapped inside can escape from it, and then a cow into a cat, so that it's no longer blocking your path. So that element does at least make things a lot more satisfying and entertaining than just solving abstract wor puzzles in isolation.

 

Most of the game, though, has you controlling a little girl as she runs around what appears to be a mediterranean island, getting into mischief, magically transforming objects, and so on. Though the game doesn't appear to have any horror elements, the easiest comparision to make is to Resident Evil, since you're moving a polygon character around various pre-rendered backgrounds with different camera angles, and it's often obvious what you can interact with, since it too will be a polygon object. 

 

I can only make vague guesses as to what the plot's actually about, because it is of course, all in Japanese. But there is a really cool presentational quirk to it: there's no voice acting! Instead, characters will gesticulate as if they're talking, while musical sounds will play, conveying the mood of what they're saying, with subtitles in Japanese appearing onscreen at the same time. This is a cool and imaginitive touch, and really adds a lot to the whole "high quality animated movie" feel of the game.

 

Unfortunately, though, like I said at the start of the review, I didn't like this game at all. I got bored wandering around the island looking for the next puzzle to solve, and actually solving the puzzles wasn't satisfying enough for me to make up for how boring and/or frustrating they could get. But also like I said up at the top, this is clearly a very high quality game, and if you are a fan of adventure games and fixed puzzles, I feel confident in saying it's definitely worth your time and attention.