Immortal Defense

You should play this game, but not expect to be completely enveloped within it. There is a certain type of person who will deeply resonate with this game, and that type of person is generally disagreeable to me. The normal person will expect to be slightly disappointed but entertained by the game.

The reasoning is so: the game is a visual novel - it's essential that we understand this - and not a puzzle game. It is, in fact, not even a horror game. Every moment you perceive as the plot developing, or a darkness falling, or a secret unveiling, you are mistaken, because the game is and must be a mundane experience in the shoes of a strange old woman, her dead companion, a crow, and some old French fabilic creatures.

This would be acceptable, and even agreeable, if the passage through the game was not by means of a puzzle. Fundamentally, unraveling, slowly, by tedium and by few clues, the puzzle of the game, is laborious: ultimately, it becomes disappointing, being that all amounts of intrigue resolve in a means that could transpire without the magical environ of the story. And, disagreeably, the intentional misleading of the player by images and tinges and atmosphere, not only builds an expectation of sudden horror, that again never transpires, but muddles and confuses the solution to the main puzzle. Again, this would not be an issue, if not for the story being entirely trapped up around this puzzle: if ever you become stuck, you are forced to slam your head, sometimes literally, against the same walls, with the same responses from those walls, until you can eke out the answer. This of course becomes monotony and eventually, boring.

Finally, reprehensibly, there are secrets to the game - but the secrets are ultimately meaningless. There is a chance that secret will be revealed to you by a floating, golden fawn. Good, and in fact, the player wishes that this should happen more often. But in following the train of secrets, you are forced to glare at ugly textures, gaps and holes in the creation of the game, that point to you, "you are breaking the meta." In fact, you are not breaking the meta. The meta is never acknowledged, and, in all you are doing is walking to places the author wants you to walk to, and, even worse, are a part of the game internally.

Your reward at the culmination of the train of secrets, and viewing a series of grotesque and glaring graphical faux-pas, is a new ending. Unfortunately, this ending is worse than the one you get normally, and bodes for the game nothing but a potential future sequel. So, you are being acknowledged by having the next product shilled unto you.

I might forgive the issues described of the secrets in the game, if not for one last issue, which I have kept hidden to myself to reveal to you in greater revile here at the end: there is an extra secret in the game, which has been left accidentally and leads to nothing. It is the hardest secret to reach, it bodes the most promise for externing the lore of the game, and yet, it is in fact an accident, and should not be in the game. This then says, that all the former graphical issues were not a deliberate consideration, but in fact, a lapse of judgement, and, ultimately, capability: this then reduces the game from an experience, an atmosphere, an adventure, even a collection, into a simple retelling of a singular, mundane, everyday story.

Everything associated with that story must then be simple air and tack, arbitrarily chosen out of immediate interest rather than intent and design. The gameplay - puzzles and all - the cards, the old woman, the cellar, the tree, the strange animals, the floating fawns, all are but setpiece for a narrative that was not just unworth the curation, but in its lowest consideration, repugnant.

14/3/2026