Simple swipes across the screen allow for a quick and easy way to rotate the screen, while solving puzzles has a more hands-on approach. When undocked, the Joycon are thrown out the window in favour of touch controls. However, when the puzzles require a delicate handling of things, the cursor moving off-centre can cause basic errors that just hamper the experience.įrom personal opinion, The Eyes of Ara is best played in handheld. Oftentimes, the on-screen cursor will move off-centre, though this can be fixed by pressing a button on the controller to re-centre the cursor. Some puzzles involve having to rotate a sequence of jigsaw pieces or discs to align up various pieces together.ĭue to needing to be pixel-perfect with some of these puzzles, the 'jaggedness' of the motion control can cause the simplest of tasks into an arduous chore. While in theory this makes sense, the mechanical limitations of the Switch can make the puzzles much harder than they need to be. The controller acts as a mouse, with motion-control being the means to move the on-screen cursor around the scenes to select objects or solve puzzles. While in docked mode, it requires only one joy-con. The Eyes of Ara, originally a PC title, tries to emulate the same experience when playing on the Nintendo Switch. Where completing puzzles can spark moments of joy, it can also plant seeds of doubt when the puzzles become much too hard. Countless hours have been wasted trying to find the answers, only to realise with the help of a guide that the poor technician may never have founded that solution otherwise. It's only in the late-game where the difficulty truly ramps up - and even the most puzzle-hardened veterans may be hard-pressed to discover the answers without trying to consult a walkthrough or guide. Generally, if a puzzle is too hard to figure out, it's probably because the answer lies within one of the documents that the technician has found - or it's hidden in one of the rooms waiting to be found. To be fair, most of the puzzles in the early-to-midway point of the adventure are pretty easy to figure out and the solutions lie in various documents or journals that are found within the castle. While the puzzles might seem easy at the beginning, it all soon begins to descend into some really painful moments of despair. Searching through every nook and cranny within each room unlocks potential solutions to some of the puzzles, or may unlock more of this mysterious story, or also contain some filler material that may mean nothing at all. Like the back-story that surrounds the circumstances of the castle, the puzzles and the solutions to them have to be pieced together. In The Eyes of Ara, nothing is explained. The puzzles in the beginning are pretty tame, and they do a great job of introducing the possible concepts that are to be expected in the rest of this adventure.
However, the technician can't just switch vantage points if already in the room - so a minor issue is having to leave the room through the right door that corresponds to the desired vantage point upon re-entering the room. Few rooms have various vantage points that depend on which door the technician entered the room from and these vantage points can reveal previously hidden items or 'hotspots' that are worth investigating. In fact, the idea of perspective plays out well in some rooms.
There were only a few items that were hard to find due to being placed in awkward spots, where vision was severely limited due to where the character was standing. Due to the restricted nature of the gameplay, and the lack of being able to freely move around the castle, this places a lot of emphasis on getting the perspective right.įor the most part, points of interest scattered throughout the rooms can be easily discoverable.
#The eyes of ara pc requirements series#
This fits snugly in the point-and-click genre, as the technician traverses the castle through a series of screens - each one represents a new area, and the technician can rotate 360 degrees around the room to try and spot objects or environmental 'hotspots' to interact with. While the similarity to Myst is visually striking, it's clear from the outset that this is anything but a carbon clone of the '90s hit.
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