Parents' Guide to NaissanceE

This is a funky ride that's very strange, and though it's a welcome change of pace from most first-person puzzle games, it also can be very confusing. It's not quiet or brimming with personality that smacks you in the face. It's understated, and perhaps too much so. Prepare to be confused for a long time about where to go, how to solve the puzzles in each space, and what the puzzles around you even are. Most of them boil down to trial-and-error jumping around expansive spaces, while others necessitate switches to be thrown in specific orders. Jumping puzzles are typically problematic in first-person games, and that's no exception here -- frankly it can be tedious in spaces as large as this one.

Later, the game gets even more ambitious in terms of spaces that open up to you and the amount of pressure it puts on you. What was a more patient exploration suddenly drills into you a sense of urgency and escape -- and if you don't keep moving and find your way on to the next area, you die. Whether it's "good" or not is completely subjective, because clearly NaissanceE wants to explore the different types of games it can be as much as it encourages you to wander around its spaces. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's always fairly interesting, if not also confounding.