.ritual is a stylish low-poly, first-person puzzle adventure game where you play as a young space wizard exploring a long forgotten city.
As you explore the ruins of the world, you must collect and reunite the scattered shards of an ancient, unknowable relic. Navigating this strange realm requires powering a series of architectural artifacts using the colored power orbs you find strewn across the land. There is a finite amount of these orbs however, so you will have to carefully plan your path to activate the appropriate bridges and doors in order to cross to new areas. The world of .ritual is a bit confusing until you get your bearings. As the level immediately branches out after the first puzzle resolves, you will need to quickly familiarize yourself with your surroundings to avoid getting lost. A map system would be tremendously helpful for future iterations of the game. .ritual would also do well to focus more on the puzzle-solving aspect of its gameplay rather than the platforming, as currently, the placement of some relic shards on high ledges makes them impossible to retrieve.
Aestheically, .ritual keeps its color palette and models very simplistic, resulting in an interesting combination of sleek science-fiction and magical fantasy loveliness. The shift in gravity as you move across the islands is a subtle nod towards the true nature of the character’s lonely expedition. The only drawback in regards to .ritual’s presentation lies in its scenic animations. While the waving seas of grass at first feel very ethereal, the constant undulation of the world beneath your feet can quickly become overwhelming, resulting a feeling akin to seasickness. Softening and reducing these movements would go a long way to reducing that feeling of nausea.
If you’re looking to try out a unique adventure game with just the right mix of futurism and fantasy, .ritual is certainly a game well worth exploring.
Download The .ritual Alpha Demo Here
After playing your game for a bit here are some issues I ran into:
On the title screen, you can push enter multiple times to restart the game loading
Return to base does not work. It just makes the game go to white, and clicking on it over and over restarts the whiting.
It occasionally locked a direction input, causing me to restart the game.
The font for when looking at things needs to be something that isn’t block, it blends in too well.
Textures are needed, for blank walls are unacceptable for 2015 going to 2016, even making the walls pixelated would’ve been fine.
I couldnt play the game because my camera in the game kept constantly moving to the top left of the screen and spun me in circles, and my mouse could not gain control of the character. but I could move fine with wasd just not look with the mouse