Euclidean

I'll give Euclidean this much: it gets Lovecraft. It understands that the draw of cosmic horror is not the universal fear of cuttlefish, but the existential angst of realizing your own insignificance in the face of infinity. However, in practice, it missteps. Despite the beautiful visuals that nicely reinforce your feeling of smallness, it's hard to feel like the universe is an incomprehensible, impersonal vastness when Yog-Sothoth is laughing sinisterly in your ear through the game about how you don't matter and how this place is going to destroy you. You can't simultaneously not matter and be the subject of sadistic glee. In addition, your near-complete lack of agency might have serviced in the feeling of helplessness, but personally I felt less like a human being reduced to a puny morsel and more like a cubist interpretation of the life of a krill in the deep ocean. The game is short (I beat it in less than an hour despite my many, many deaths) and might be worthy of a VR experi...

Euclidean is not a game for most people. The whole game is as if the last twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Call of Cthulhu had a baby, and that baby ate LSD infused shrooms. Therefore this game could be considered a confusingly boring waste of time, or a masterpiece of psychological horror that greatly shows the basis of Lovecraftian Cosmicism; how insignificant humans are in the grand scheme of the universe and that there are things far greater than us in this universe that we will never know of. The "narrator" does a spectacular job of showing just how small and weak are character is, and how everything we do won't matter at all in the end. If you are at all a fan of H.P. Lovecraft or even any psychological horror, this is a must buy. It is only 3 dollars and is quite short, but the time you spend with it will be incredibly memorable.

Euclidean succeeds on the strength of its atmosphere rather than its mechanics. Gameplay consists of basic pathfinding: as you fall in slow motion, select a route; note where you die; take the route again and avoid the death. Had it used the same mechanics and been, say, space-themed -- dodge the asteroids and aliens -- the game would not have been notable. It is the spot-on execution of a Lovecraftian horror theme that makes Euclidean into something special. As you progress from stage to stage, the question is never "How should I proceed?" (find a path through trial-and-error), but rather "What the blazes am I going to see?" And oh, the things you will see ... Although the environments and creatures are largely abstract, there are just enough references to identifiable things to make your descent into the darkness extremely unsettling. Bubbles rise around you, your heartbeat pounds in your ears, classical Greek architecture breaks apart in front of you, worms sprout from walls, and ...

Euclidean is one hard mother-humper of a game. You want to know HOW hard? Well, first of all there's three difficulty levels: Hard, Nightmarish and Impossible. Secondly, it took me about five minutes to even work out how to START the frigging game (hint: look up, rather than around you...you'll get what I mean when you play). Thirdly, I apparently died SEVEN TIMES just on the first level, which is basically only a few minutes long. Yup, it's HARD. But what else is it? Well, it's atmospheric as all buggery. Atmospheric, and immersive. Oh, and did I mention HARD?! Just in case I hadn't already. Once one gets past all the hallucinatory, Eldritch-ian razzle and dazzle, though, it's essentially a trial-and-error game (a la Limbo, perhaps): In other words, prepare to die, MANY, MANY TIMES. There's simply no way anyone is going to get through this game first time without dying a lot, 'cause you need to know what's about to kill you two seconds from now in order to be able t...

Does falling in slow motion and repeatedly restarting a level over and over sound like fun? No. Ok, then I'd not recommend this.

[TL;DR: An OK experience with good ideas, which is limited in gameplay, and is unfortunately crippled without a VR headset.] Unless you have a VR headset of your own (and most people don't) I would not get this. This game really does seem like it would work best with the VR headset and was designed with it at it's center. But beyond that, there is very little to gameplay (more on that in paragraph three). So, it does look quite nice, and I like the design of the monsters and the overall artstyle. The opening scene/menu was really striking and beautiful (it sets a mood for sure), and I would like to see more of a full game with this kind of look and feel. The gameplay consists simply of falling at a snail's pace down into an abyss. You can slowly drift around as you do so, with the goal being to avoid the monsters and obsticles in your way. This simple gameplay it does pretty well, and I found it challenging. Yet there is absolutely nothing else to that beyond that. I got to level 5 ...

Start from the top, get to the bottom. Faller titles have never quite enjoyed the success of their horizontal runner brethren but are happy to instil just as much panic in the player. Euclidean isn't so much about the frantic hammering of keys as it is the dread-filled holding of them; the action moves at a crawl, the enemies lurch rather than sprint, the anticipation of collision made all the more tense as you barely squeeze past danger during your descent into a Lovecraftian oblivion. There's a few minor faults here. The title screen is unreasonably obtuse to navigate and the wireframe-esque player model stuck forever in its default pose robs the game of total immersion. Utterly forgiveable though, considering the excellent realisation of the forbidden dimension you steadily sink into enveloped in a haunting ambient soundtrack. Not one to pump the blood but still a title to crawl upon the skin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r_FrOmoRsQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prAMiIHIYkc

Played this on my Vive and I think the VR experience adds so much to the atmosphere that you can't get playing on a monitor. The sense of being completely inside this bizarre world as you float downward is oddly disturbing and relaxing at the same time. I also wonder if being able to look around in a more realistic fashion helps your survival. During most of the game you are looking downward (I recommend sitting on the floor), but some parts almost require you to see monsters coming at you from the side. Glancing around is way easier with your head than with a mouse. Upon successfully completing the game I'd only died 31 times, and the highest number of deaths I had on any of the nine levels was 7. I had to go back and intentionally die to get the achievements for 25 deaths on a level and 50 deaths total. For reference I played on "nightmarish" (the middle) difficulty level. I skipped trying to do a permadeath play-through. There is no action to be had here. Simply avoid hitting or b...

WTF? This is the best hardcore, permadeath dying simulator ever! The first challenge is to figure out how to start the game, in order to die the first time… ;-) Seriously, you can adjust the level of difficulty. Happy dying!

Dive feet-first into boredom. A little trippy, maybe. Scary? I guess..? Not for everybody. Not for me. Spend 3 uneventful minutes just to fall into unavoidable, nearly-invisible monster made of spastic boxes, repeat. That's the game. The whole game.