Vorlorn is the kind of game that relies on atmosphere to pull you into the narrative. This has been done well in the past with games like Shadow of the Colossus or Yume Nikki to great success, but while those games are stellar, I found Vorlorn to be a disappointing experience.

Story
Vorlorn begins with a painfully tired premise: Donavin has set out to resurrect his lost love Nadia. Specifically, he's going through a labyrinth called the citadel, which has some convoluted magical properties that can make people's wishes come true; Donavin's wish, of course, is to have Nadia back. The idea of love being the driving force of the human experience has been rehashed probably more than any other theme throughout most media. Vorlorn tries to use the timelessness of this premise in order to feel like a legend rather than a realistic story, however I still found Donavin and Nadia difficult to care about since they were--probably intentionally--drained of anything that makes them unique.

That's not to say that the story isn't presented well. Scenes make great use of screen effects and lighting to set the right kind of mood, often hopping between the dark, gloomy halls of the citadel to the ethereal pastures of Donavin and Nadia's generic, idyllic past. However, with Vorlorn's lack of character development, these scenes didn't have much impact.

Graphics
Vorlorn's real saving grace is its visuals. There was a pretty large list of scripts in the credits, so I imagine that the dynamic lighting effects were borrowed, but they were still implemented well. The gloomy atmosphere of the citadel will keep you on the edge of your seat, and the brief moments outdoors provide a calm, gorgeous contrast. I don't know how much of the graphics are custom, but they're consistently well-presented and gripping, mostly because of the expert use of lighting effects.

Audio
The music tracks seem to be at least mostly borrowed, which I don't particularly like to see. The musical choices all fit, and keeping the music low and brooding connects with the visuals to keep the atmosphere riveting. The game also makes great use of sound effects; you can hear Donavin slosh through water or his footsteps echoing through an empty corridor. I also really loved Donavin's heavy breathing and heartbeat, which occur in lieu of a health bar. This kept the atmosphere intact in a unique way. My only real problem is that, when I recognized a music track, it pulled me out of the game; this was particularly true when a track from Chrono Cross started playing during a heartfelt scene. It just made me think of the heartfelt scenes in Chrono Cross and how the characters were more nuanced and the scenes more impactful because of it.

Gameplay
The gameplay is focused more on puzzles than anything else. I never found myself getting stuck on a puzzle for very long, and I don't know if this means that they were too easy or that they were the right amount of intuitive. There were only three puzzles that I didn't solve immediately upon seeing them. The first one was a puzzle involving two sets of three boxes. My big beef with this one was the amount of boxes; considering the solution to the puzzle, I don't see why you would need more than one box on either side. The fact that there were three made me first think they were acting as a combination lock, which was an unnecessary red herring, as was the fact that they reset when returning to the area, which lead me to think that the solution would be immediately evident on that screen. However, this was the only puzzle that I felt had an actual design problem (aside from the four-way looping path, though I managed to stumble through that by guessing pretty quickly).

The second puzzle I got stuck on was a boss fight, and my problem with it was that I didn't know I could hit the boss. After a certain point, Donavin gets a sword, however, there's no sword-swinging animation; you have to walk up to an enemy and press space bar on them, and then a slash graphic appears on them. If anyone here has played Lagoon on Super Nintendo, your sword range is EVEN WORSE here. There is a bit of a difference in that this game was designed with that short range in mind, but there are moments when enemies will hit you multiple times before your sword connects. For the aforementioned boss fight, my initial thought was "I have to slash him," but when I hit space bar on him a few times with no result, I began trying other things that didn't pan out.

The third puzzle I got stuck on was another boss fight, and I figured out the solution to it quite quickly, but the sheer amount of enemies pummeled me into submission four or five times before I beat it. This was another instance where the sword mechanic hurt the game. However, there was another aggravating part to this fight that really hurt the experience: in order to reenter the fight, I had to go through what should have been about a five second cutscene, but the game makes it feel like it lasts minutes. This is where my biggest complaint about this game comes in: sometimes its brooding atmosphere shoots itself in the foot. The dialogue is what really kills me. Letters come up one at a time, so characters have the delivery of stroke victims struggling through simple sentences. Luckily the dialogue exchanges are condensed to barely anything, but this was still annoying, especially if I died. The idea here was to make the dialogue brooding and dreamlike, but I don't think the game needed this, and the characters' dialogue didn't have enough weight to really take advantage of this slow pace.

There are also several moments where the player's movement is forced to slow down to a crawl, most commonly on staircases, though it also happens during key scenes--like finding the sword. Walking down a giant hallway at half a mile an hour builds a great sense of tension and wonder for a while, but when it keeps going and going, it just becomes another annoyance, and, when you have to make that same agonizing trip BACK down that hallway, you get that same feeling where you have been in traffic for a while, then you start moving at a decent speed, only to have to slow back down to a stop moments later.

Overall
I've said a lot of bad things about Vorlorn, so I'd like to stress what I enjoyed about it: Vorlorn is really a lesson in how to get atmosphere right. However, that same atmosphere created a few annoyances that could have been easily mended. While the story has been pared down to nothing, the game's short length (it took me about two hours) means that it won't disappoint you, but it's not showing you anything you haven't seen before. The puzzles are well-designed for the most part but veer on the side of easy, so if you tend to like getting stumped by a puzzle (for the right reasons), then this game isn't going to give you enough brain food to constitute more than a light snack.