Innocence Island

I saw this game be played on an IGC Showcasing and fell in love with the concept. After initially expirience motion sickness, the dev reached out and quickly put in place a selection of options to help ease the issue and I am no longer expiriencing it! This game features a very unique game mechanic, you are completely clueless on how to do anything until you see it be done by someone else. I found this concept very intriguing and while I am not done with the game, I have now gotten enough into it to have a general feel for it. Some of the elements you will find in this: - Exploration - Puzzles - Parkouring - Fighting (Optional) - Crafting - Cooking Will return to edit review once I completed the game, but for the length into it I am, I will highly recommend this game!

Please note that my playtime as of writing this review is low, but that's because I primarily played it on PS5. It got lost in the backlog during my transition back to PC gaming, and I intend to pick it up again. I only got four, maybe five hours into it, but I feel I have a basic grasp of what the game is like, and why it's worth playing. First off - this is a one man indie project. It's *extremely* janky. The animations in particular are very clunky and odd. But the game reeks with charm from head to toe. The primary game mechanic, while perhaps underutilized, is a unique one - you cannot do anything that you haven't first observed someone else do. The game starts, for instance, with you lying on the ground, unable to walk until you observe a nearby chicken doing so. As you progress in the game, you gain the ability to use magic - shortly before I finished my last play session, I had unlocked the ability to summon a sort of spirit deer, which massively opened up traversal options. ...

It has an interesting idea and I enjoyed the possibilities, but the execution is not there. Too janky, too many visual problems, poor base mechanics, and the world is too big for how empty it is. Feels like an alpha version of a potentially really fun game.