Yono and the Celestial Elephants

Ok, here I am really sitting on a fence.

Because I liked the flavour of the game: there isn't much story, but the setting was rather fascinating, and despite the overall game having a colourful kids' game look, it throws quite unexpected philosophical, spiritual and political discussions, there are myths and all that...so the ambience of the game was actually delightfully weird.

But the gameplay left quite a lot to desire. There were some fights but the regular ones were rather straightforward and trivial, puzzles were nice, also usually quite straightforward to figure how to solve them or at least what was the next step to do...except for the couple of boss fights where I had no idea what was happening or what I was supposed to be doing (and after looking at walkthrough, I'd still say that they were not intuitive at all and since no clues were present ingame, I'd call them poorly designed).

After a while the rewards didn't do much anymore (there were little uses for coins except cosmetics, and when I picked up early on the one I liked best, after collecting all the stories the extra letters didn't do anything anymore, and after a while the extra lives didn't really affect things either), and at some point the puzzles became more and more a question of getting the timing of a series of actions right (an element which I rather dislike in puzzle games) with little to no room for error (which I absolutely loathe in puzzle games): despite knowing what I was supposed to be doing, actually performing the action in the very narrow time frames given were a struggle, and a boring struggle.

So while I had a good time in the first half of the game, the second half became increasingly annoying and frustrating, and finally I decided to give up and not finish the game, it was no longer worth it (on a level where I noticed the walkthrough decided to pass by exploiting a bug instead of bothering to solve it. I figured out the solution, but couldn't bother to actually perform it).

Lots of promise but ultimately not worth it.