I wanted to have a Game EXP article written and ready for last Friday. Then that date changed to today's Friday. That still is not happening because in Goetia, a game that I thought might take upwards of 6.5 - 8 hours, has currently taken me over 5 hours and I look to be only 40% of the way through, and at times I feel like it might end up taking more than 10 hours. Which is not a bad thing considering my usual slower-than-usual play style.
I am torn. I love the visual aesthetic, I love the referenced source material, I love the story, but playing the game is mentally draining and there have been times when I have consciously not wanted to jump in and play.
Goetia (Go-eh-tee-uh as it is pronounced in Greek where the word originates, as opposed to being pronounced Go-ee-shuh as it is often pronounced in occult circles) is a point-and-click adventure and mystery game developed by Sushee and released on multiple platforms in 2015 and ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2018, which is the system that I played it on. This was one of those games that pulled me in because of the name, the banner in the eShop, and the low (probably around $1) price tag when I bought it. Finding out that it did include artwork and actual sigils from "The Lesser Key of Soloman" was an added bonus.
Goetia is notoriously difficult, possibly made even more difficult by the fact that I have been playing in handheld mode, so noticing visual environmental and puzzle related cues are sometimes lost on me. The number of times that I have missed stairs or a ladder in a house (signaling that there is an upstairs/attic to explore) are somewhat frequent. In the room on the left, the stairs could be easily missed, especially with a lot of the rooms already being very dark and often using environmental lighting. Knowing that there is a little black tick mark on a scale and to place the right combination of objects on said scale without any other clue in a room was definitely lost on me as I thought the puzzle in that room had to do with being able to stack so many oddly shaped objects without them tipping over. I have talked a number of times about how my brain makes puzzles, especially in point-and-click games, a lot more complicated than they actually are, and in Goetia that is definitely true as well.
Then there is the issue that I have with too much of the game being accessible. When you start the game, you are limited to the number of rooms and areas you are able to explore. You are blocked from areas by locked doors and occultist sigils barring you from passing through to other areas of the main mansion. Then, in what seemed like a very quick series of events, more of the house opened up, access to a forest (outside of the mansion) opened up, a village in the opposite direction of the mansion and forest opened up, and I stumbled into a picture (kinda Mary Poppins style) where you could dive into other paintings and pictures, essentially being a new full-on multi-screen area. I was a little overwhelmed with access to all of these new areas and having access to items I still did not have use for. Mental strain abound trying to keep track of all of the rooms I now had access to as well as what objects I could posses
The second issue I take with the game is when you find notes and letters, you see pages with the text printed in books or handwritten letters. In a lot of games that have this visual feature, there is the option to bring a sans-serif text of what is written, partly because reading and processing some handwriting can be difficult, but especially on the Switch's screen, it makes reading a digital font quite the strain on my lil' peepers, and there might even be something about retaining information if you read in a font that is not a serif font.
But despite game feeling like it is a trudge to play at times and difficult to read had written notes and small text, Sushee thankfully integrated the use of the Select Button (is it still called the Select Button or just the "- Button") to bring up little magnifying glasses over objects you can interact with. While there are occasionally are objects on screen that glow and have sparkle-like sparkles coming off of them (signifying that they are items that will end up in your recorded notes inventory), some items blend in perfectly with the rest of the background. While you could just run the cursor over the screen and inevitably find something to interact with, there are times when there are multiple object so close to each other that it would be easy to not realize that the radio and the paper on the desk are selectable.
I am actually enjoying Goetia when I get into the flow of the game, usually when I am exploring a new are and everything is brand new. It is when have been in an area for a while and I have a couple puzzles that I know exist but do not know how to complete that I become exhausted. Even before I boot up the game, knowing that I have left so many puzzles unsolved can be a deterrent to turning the game on and instead playing either Super Mario Bros. 35 or booting up Castlevania again for the umpeetnth time just to play up to the third stage. But I will finish Goetia because I am interested in the story and how it incorporates the "Lesser Key of Soloman" in a way that is usually left to independent and art house movies that most major studios would never go near.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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