Rhem 3

I just finished Rhem 3, and I liked it a lot.

When I looked at the cover, I thought “Sigh, another Myst knockoff.” And yes, it is a Myst knockoff, but it’s no Crystal Key. It’s very well done, and a huge amount of fun, if and only if you love puzzles. There is no plot. The scenery isn’t breathtaking or fanciful like in Myst. It’s well rendered, and I did indeed gasp with amazement like I did in Myst, but for different reasons. In Myst, I gasped at the many beautiful and awe-inspiring views, landscapes, and structures. In Rhem, I gasped at the sheer vastness of the place. “Oh my God, it’s another entire new area!” I would exclaim quite often.

In a sense, Rhem 3 is one enormous puzzle. Many actions you take in one area will cause you to backtrack to an entirely different area to reap the consequences of your initial action. But it’s not arbitrary non-local effects (which I hate). If you follow the pipe connected to that button, and follow it, and figure out where it comes out on the other side when it goes into that wall… it will eventually lead you to the place where the non-local effect happens.

My favourite instance of this is how there are tons of clues scrawled on the backs of doors. There will be a door that can only be opened and closed from one side. You have to close it, then make a huge winding loop around the entire game to get to the other side of the door to see the clue. Similarly for elevators and such. I really like that kind of puzzle. It requires really knowing your way around the area and becoming holistically familiar with Rhem. You can’t just have a separate page of notes for each area, because they are all connected. All eight pages of notes worth. (: Maps were very important, and I really enjoyed mapping out the different areas. It was HARD, because the world is so intrinsically 3-D. Sometimes I’d need to know what was directly under me or above me, and that was very challenging to map accurately.

I loved the puzzles in Rhem 3. There was a really cool puzzle where two bridges could be either up or down, and when they were up they could be used as ladders. A tricky sequence of ups, downs, platform manipulations and crossovers was needed to get to all the various places. A lot of them are like “Oh, I’ve seen that set of symbols before! They’re paired with this other set of symbols, and this other set of symbols is the key to unlock this puzzle.”

Minor spoilers ahead.

And the steganography was WONDERFUL! I looked at several paintings, and was like “Huh, it’s a painting, I wonder what it could possibly signify. It just looks like a plain old painting to me.” And of course much later I figured it out. (Kyeli was good at this part.) And there was an ENTIRE BOOK, only ONE PAGE of which was actually relevant! Actually, there were THREE of those! And a series of FOUR PAINSTAKINGLY HAND-DRAWN PAINTINGS, only one of which was relevant! I love that sort of thing. It’s excellent when you can’t assume that every single clue is necessarily relevant to some puzzle.

There are two possible endings, a good ending and a special bonus ending. To get the special bonus ending, you have to solve two additional puzzles, one of which is on the backs of lots of doors (and such) and one of which you can solve by being very observant and clever. The hints I needed were as follows:

1. explore a particular room more thoroughly
2. explore a particular area (about 1/20 of the world) more thoroughly

and I also got some hints for one of the two bonus puzzles:

1. “Where else could you see that particular thing from?”
2. explore a particular area (about 1/10 of the world) more thoroughly

but I didn’t strictly need those. I had already narrowed down that puzzle to 32 possible combinations, which wouldn’t have been too time-consuming to try. So that’s not too bad. Just some focusing hints that saved me some time wandering around each area of the game again.

I only have a couple of minor gripes.

Gripe #1: Fake clues. There were two puzzles where you appeared to get clues, but later on you got more information that told you “Gotcha! Those clues were wrong, and these are the real clues!” The first one of these was the triangle puzzle. The middle triangles all have question marks by them, which subtly indicates that they are actually wrong, and another clue gives you the corrected values for the middle triangles. Luckily I found the key with the corrected values, but if I hadn’t, I would have been super frustrated when I tried to input the key and got a buzzer sound. Sheesh, Knut. You could have had the middle triangles all be blank instead of having false values with question marks by them. That’s just cruel. The other such puzzle was the idol teeth puzzle. There’s one clue that leads you to believe that one of the keys is all white, but in fact there’s a more subtle clue that reveals the correct answer. I think this is just unnecessarily mean. Knut could have easily made the all-white solution make an immediate buzzer noise or something to clue you in that you were missing something. I’m happy with complex puzzles, but don’t lead the player to believe they’ve got a correct solution when in fact they haven’t. It’s just unnecessarily frustrating and anti-rewarding.

Gripe #2: The lamp puzzle. Most of the puzzles were well designed so that you couldn’t solve them by brute force, and so that they stayed solved once you solved them the first time. The lamp/door puzzle near the beginning didn’t stay solved, and since you need to pass through that room fairly often, it was annoying to have to solve it each time.

Gripe #3: The chokepoint. There was a single chokepoint in the game. There was one elevator that effectively segmented the world into two halves. Given the immensity and interconnectedness of Rhem, it’s just kind of inelegant to have a chokepoint like that. But that’s a very minor gripe.

I loved Rhem 3, and I’m definitely going to play Rhem 1 and Rhem 2 now.

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