What's on the other side?
Following closely in the footsteps of first-person puzzlers like Myst and Riven, Reah offers much to the puzzle fan but less to those who actually like their puzzles to be integrated with the story. It feels too much like a collection of conundrums which simply aren't tied into the narrative and thus ultimately proves unsatisfying as an experience. The game takes place in the far future, where a colony was established on an alien world to investigate a mysterious artefact, which turned out to be a gateway to another dimension. You play a journalist chosen to visit the other side but when the portal shuts down, you find yourself trapped at the walls of a mighty city with no option but to investigate for yourself. What follows is a traditional first-person, point-and-click adventure, where you explore the increasingly complex and bizarre alien, solving the many puzzles which bar your progress. There are more than one hundred here to test your skills and there's a good variety of styles and with most of them being quite enjoyable and satisfying to solve. There's certainly enough to keep even genre veterans playing for some hours, as long as they are only interested in the puzzles. However, if you like to feel that solving a problem actually contributes in some meaningful way to the overall experience and which advances the story, then you're going to be disappointed, as that simply isn't the case here. The visuals are lush enough, with that nice 90s look to them and lots of exotic detail to enjoy but ultimately this proves little more than a collection of decent puzzles.
