After a long gestation period, and a change of name, Lisssn is
ultimately a rather mixed bag.
I am predisposed to like these types of game, and was a very big fan
of the RHEM series (Knut Muller is involved here). I found this however
to be both a challenging and frustrating muddle, with too much
repetition and backtracking. Its construction also did not inspire me to
persist once I got to the "end", but more of that later.
The game involves the capture of La Musica, and your challenge to
rescue her to restore music to the world. It's an entrée to a rather
drab world devoid of much else except the puzzles. Which is fine in and
of itself, but only if the puzzles shine.
Which some do, and there are also lots of them, so if one is not to
your liking, another will be not far away. Like RHEM, a number involve
manipulating your environment, and a spatial awareness will serve you
well at times. It isn't nearly as coherent a world as I recall RHEM to
be though, and its sprawling nature means there is a lot of wandering
around, through winding twisting passages that will likely have you
confused about where you want to be more than once.
Quite a few puzzles repeat, which I did find somewhat tiresome. Part
of the attraction of many of the puzzles is winkling out its
"how", or what is it you have to do in order to solve it. A
lot are quite good, and provide that satisfactory jolt of a job well
done. Some though suffer from repetition - for instance you might work
out you need to fill wine glasses to a certain level in order to play a
scale as well as how to go about doing that. Having done so, there is no
real attraction in having to do it five more times. The puzzle was
solved on the first occasion; the rest just feels like filler.
I don't put the train manipulation into this category. Moving it
around from place to place so you could access it later was altogether
different to doing the exact same thing again and again.
The world of Lisssn is fairly open from very early on, and while
there are doors to unlock and bridges to lower, which will prevent
access to certain places, there are many areas to explore that are
immediately available to you. Thorough exploration is required
throughout the game, as well as attention to detail. A clue for one
puzzle can be some way away, as might be the cause and effect of a
pulled lever or a pushed button. You will know if something useful has
happened by the sound made (eg a satisfactory unlocking click), but it
might not happen right there in front of you.
And make sure to close things!
Music and sound features quite heavily. Recognise tones, replay
scales, arrange played musical notes; even just enjoy some musical
vignettes. There is a lot of lisssn-ing to do and to factor into the
puzzle solutions. It can be directional as well (e.g. which way to go in
a maze), and the game helps to ensure you have that aspect covered at
the start.
It is a lengthy game, especially by comparison to many current
offerings, and a pen and paper will assist, if only for mapping the
environment and keeping track of things that need to be solved later.
Throughout the game you find so called memory cards, which are used
in a puzzle just before the end. You need to find 15 pairs, and it pays
to look hard. Very hard. Don’t think they don't matter.
I mentioned the end at the start, and confess to watching it on
YouTube. I reached a point close to the end where a panel would not
open, and I had no idea why. If you haven't pressed or pulled something,
the game doesn't really provide any feedback as to what or where that
might be. You simply have to revisit everything and everywhere in order
to find whatever it is that you didn't do.
Revisiting your past endeavours is part and parcel of many games.
Indeed, it is the price you pay for less than fulsome exploration and
attention. But here, the drabness, the sprawling confusion of the world,
everything that had come before and the lack of any inkling of what to
do or where to go, wore me out before I overcame. Shame on me, but I had
had enough.
A contributing factor was the memory cards. I reached the point where
they are used, but was several cards short of the number needed. Perhaps
if that panel had opened, the bit of the game world accessible to me
would have yielded the rest. Or perhaps somewhere in everything that had
come before I had missed a pair. Given what I had to do in order to find
some of them, the prospect of going back through the world on a treasure
hunt did not fill me with glee. Shame on me again perhaps.
Lisssn plays in the first person, is entirely point and click, and
you can save at will. The inventory ribbon is at the bottom of the
screen, and you click to use items in the game world. Icons will
indicate something needs to be done with an object or at a location, and
a “pointing” curser will indicate the directions you can move, node
to node style. There is no spoken word, you don't find people to
"talk" to, and there are limited animations. The less said
about the purple troll the better.
I didn't dislike Lisssn, but it didn't do it for me either.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz
RAM: 32GB GDDR5
Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz
