Qora

Qora tricks you. It starts you off in a village full of characters to whom you can talk who mix quirks (some legitimately funny) and little hints at the game's world. Then the "proper" game begins and you get almost none of that for the next hour and a half. The good ending (and maybe the bad ending, to a lesser degree) has some extra dialogue for you to enjoy, but it doesn't make up for how mechanically dull the rest of the game was.

This shares some DNA with cinematic platformers, but fear not, there's no mechanical challenge involved. This is a traversal simulator through and through: you don't jump so much as have a contextual button to handle anything more complex than walking or climbing a ladder, including breaking rocks and cutting tall grass. This gets old fast as it's just busywork.

There's a (similarly contextual) dedicated "watch ghosts/the past" button, and this is there for flavour only. Sometimes it reveals a bit of the parallel storyline, sometimes just pretty stuff to look at. It never particularly changes your assessment of the storyline. Similarly for flavour you meet every now and then a traveller with whom you can talk but his dialogue never changes.

If you want a bit of extra challenge you can slightly go out of your way to turn on some altars for the good ending. But these are few and far between and not enough to make up for the monotony faced elsewhere.

Environments are pretty, you just wish you could experience them in a way that felt more meaningful or fun. Ultimately this all becomes obvious when you read on the store page:

"visionary filmmaker Holden Boyle's first video game Qora"

Boyles seems to be a litle known director or a complete unknown whether his name is actually spelled incorrectly or not on the page. He probably should have teamed up with someone else if he wanted to make a videogame, as this is a nothingburger even by walkin sim standards.