Feist

This adventure game is very pretty but also, unfortunately, flawed. Feist's controls are imprecise, meaning so much of the jumping and dragging around of items or navigating of traps is sometimes impossible. Dying in the game isn't so bad so much as an inconvenience: Every time you misstep or can't get out of the way fast enough -- and this will happen often -- you have to wait about 15 seconds to respawn and try again from a bit further up the road. And continuing along the road is your main agenda in Feist: Going through forests, rainstorms, and lots of nature scenes to make it to your destination.

Enemies and obstacle courses dot the landscape ahead, but these also present challenges, not only in the sense that they pose difficulty but it also can be very unclear how you're supposed to progress. In one instance deep in the game, no amount of puzzle-solving attempts could fix a section where players need to know that they need to get to the right-hand side of the screen. Puzzles such as these, and the lack of a health bar, keep you largely in the dark. That's on-theme with the game's visuals, which are stark, but it would flow better if illuminations came along much more often. Feist's beauty is apparent, as is part of its charm, but unfortunately its puzzles, poor controls, and presentation issues prevent its message from being felt by its players.