Review
Played on: Xbox One
Released: 2015
Released: 2015
This month's free, Xbox Live Gold, game is Pneuma: Breath Of Life. An Unreal Engine 4 powered puzzler, played in first person. I gave it a go last evening and ended up completing the whole thing!
While perhaps going a bit too far with it's meta references and ensuring you that you might not be in a real world. Pneuma puts you in the role of a god.
While perhaps going a bit too far with it's meta references and ensuring you that you might not be in a real world. Pneuma puts you in the role of a god.
Introducing you with a walk through various rooms as the graphics become more elaborate along the way. You're slowly introduced to the simple controls and mechanics of the puzzles. I felt the narrated story was meaningless babble to be honest.
The game is played from a first person perspective and the main goal is simply to progress through rooms, in each of the games chapters. Puzzles are scattered along your way, hindering your progression until solved. The narrator hints vaguely solutions and keeping your progression flowing and interesting.
The game is played from a first person perspective and the main goal is simply to progress through rooms, in each of the games chapters. Puzzles are scattered along your way, hindering your progression until solved. The narrator hints vaguely solutions and keeping your progression flowing and interesting.
The actual puzzles are based on viewing the environments and using your eyes to manipulate objects. Rooms contain visual puzzles that need solving, centred around using your field of view. You moveset is very limited: the analogue sticks are for moving, X is used to interact with buttons and levers and there's a jump button!
Pneuma features visually stylish environments to explore, with large and bright rooms decorated with marble walls and paintings. Much like the Greek God the game inherits it's title from, the style of the game has a Mediterranean palace feel. The artstyle has a bright and clean appearance, which works beautifully and keeps the puzzles free of visual clutter.
While I enjoyed the graphical effects, like reflective surfaces and realistic lighting, the overall visuals being nothing ground breaking in my opinion, do sometimes look a little too much like an Unreal Engine 4 demo reel for my liking.
Although I enjoyed my playthrough, Pneuma is an extremely short experience. It takes around one to two hours to complete, so keep that in mind if you plan on buying the game at a later point, when it's no longer available free for Gold users.
While I enjoyed the graphical effects, like reflective surfaces and realistic lighting, the overall visuals being nothing ground breaking in my opinion, do sometimes look a little too much like an Unreal Engine 4 demo reel for my liking.
Although I enjoyed my playthrough, Pneuma is an extremely short experience. It takes around one to two hours to complete, so keep that in mind if you plan on buying the game at a later point, when it's no longer available free for Gold users.
There's basically no replay value here, as the puzzles are the same each time. It does offer some easy achievement points, if that's your thing though. I must mention that the loading times, which only occurs between chapters, are terribly optimised and feel like an eternity.
Overall, I had a short, but fairly entertaining puzzle experience. Some of them took a chunk of brain twisting to solve, but never feel unfair or insanely difficult, which I appreciated. Recommended for free with Gold indeed, otherwise only if it sells at a bargain price.
