I’m hesitant to post this because I don’t want any major spoilers, but at the same time I am betting more and more people will be playing this as its reviews are, I think, the best of any 2025 game yet.
I’ve played about 3-4 hours and I will admit, it did not feel very puzzley for the first 90 minutes or so. It has a steep beginning to climb up until you start thinking, “OK, I have several things to work on tomorrow.”
My tip is this: If you have not unlocked the Apple Orchard and gone inside and explored it, you probably are still really early in the game.
That is about as open spoil as I’ll get right now. Having been in the Orchard and looked at a few things, I feel like I have some kind of goal(s).
I won’t share my goals right now as they may nudge into spoiler territory, but I am trying to at least access just about every room in the house to see what they have to offer.
Is anyone playing?
Oh, I got to the Antechamber once at the top of the map. I could not go in. It was an early goal for me. Just telling you…you don’t just walk in.
I’m watching a Youtuber play it. (I had watched another Youtuber play through the demo a while back.) Seems kind of interesting, but not something I would shell out non-trivial money for.
Heard good things about it so I downloaded for free from Xbox Gamepass. I only played a single (day?) walkthrough and had to end not from running out of steps but all the rooms deadended. I didn’t return to the game immediately and was trying to figure out what the overall objective was. To eventually have every room on the grid and accessible with enough steps left in order to open the last?
I really want to emphasize that the game is hiding some major secrets from I’ve seen and heard. It is not as simple and basic as it looks; the opening hour or so felt like repetitive room laying out.
It remains a bit like that, but objectives/goals begin to manifest themselves and while I am not super far, I’ve heard the game goes further than “find the final room”.
I don’t know, but I doubt it. I did reach the antechamber door once and I could not open it(I got there on the West).
I’m not sure how to get in and what will happen at that point.
I’ve filled every room, opened the antechamber, did stuff related to that (involving a lot walking around) without running out of steps. It’s really easy to get more steps. I think most runs are going to be limited by room draw/deadends and resources (particularly keys.)
It seems pretty likely to get a Switch 2 release in the future, but it’s also available to play through Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate’s Cloud service. That’s CAD$23/mo, but I’m sure you could finish it in a month. It requires a controller and a Switch Pro controller would work, but it’s a bit of a pain to get working.
I’m playing it. I shared some of these thoughts in the general video gaming thread, but I’ll sorta compress them here since my attitude has slightly changed over time.
I’m not a fan of roguelikes in general, and especially dislike the randomization aspect. I like when I can figure things out deterministically.
But the game got good reviews so I thought I’d give it a shot. And for the first 1-2 hours, my concerns were validated. The randomization was annoying and could cut off a good run through no fault of my own. As it happened, my day 1 run was the best I had for several days afterward, obviously by luck rather than skill. I was about to uninstall it but persisted nevertheless.
The game does expand in scope, though. I’m now several hours in, and like Mahaloth, I now have multiple threads to untangle. While luck does play a part, at least for now I always make some forward progress on them, so it’s not a big deal. And the puzzles are pretty good, with some great blow-your-mind type realizations along the way.
There are still annoyances. I was having a very successful run, managing to collect three upgrade disks along the way. Plenty of steps/keys/gems. But as of yet, no computer to put them in. Still quite a few spots to build… but never got a room with a computer room. Finally, on the very last spot, I got one… but I had spent all my gems. I managed to save one disk in the coat room but had to discard the rest.
I’m not sure how it’ll play out from here. But I have a suspicion that eventually the big puzzles will play out, and I still won’t have finished, and I’ll have to make a choice: grind for upgrades to make things easier, or hope luck is in my favor and make a run for the end. Maybe I’m wrong and it’ll work out better than that, so we’ll just have to see. For now I’m enjoying things.
They look like an old-school 5.25" floppy disk, and say “upgrade” on them. You can find them laying around like any other object, or sometimes buy them at the commissary.
They’re moderately rare. Most runs I won’t find one at all. So three was a huge deal! And so all the more painful when I could only save one of them.
They each upgrade a random room (you can’t tell which one in advance). You get a choice of three options for that room, each one boosting the stats in a different way, often contingent on circumstances. Sometimes there are “red” versions that de-boost the stats unless you meet the conditions (which then makes it better than typical as a reward).
So this is one way to “grind” to make future runs easier. Extra keys, extra gems, etc. here and there and the dependency on luck goes down.
There are a few other categories of permanent upgrades as well. I probably haven’t found them all yet, but there are at least two more beyond “portions of the grounds that you can access” and upgrade disks.
BTW, there’s probably some kind of thing that unlocks them at all, but I don’t know what it is. Seems like there are a lot of these thresholds, where stuff only appears when you reach a certain day, or draft a certain room for the first time, etc. If they aren’t appearing, just keep playing, and draft new rooms when you see them.
I had a TERRIFIC run and even opened the door to the antechamber for the first time, only to not have the option to link(door wise) to it when I got there. I opened the West door.
I certainly know the feeling. Though I’m opening the antechamber pretty frequently these days.
I just finished a run where I’d gotten a ton of gold bonuses and ended up with 120+ gold… only to have nothing to spend it on! Extremely mild spoiler about the swimming pool:
If you drain it, there’s gold at the bottom. I was kinda hoping for more. Oh well.
Well, I managed to get a 45-room run. One sorta amusing trick I used–assuming you’ve unlocked the laboratory:
If you select “If you connect a hallway to another hallway” to “then add three aquariums to your drafting pool”, you can build a lot of aquariums, since each of them counts as a hallway and they have three doors each. So not only do the three doors make it easy to expand, but you almost always pick one in your pool.