e?1

e? is exactly as advertised: you wander around aimlessly and solve some puzzles, with an atmosphere in the style of yume nikki type games. What you see from the game’s images is pretty much what you get, so I didn’t take any screenshots. I wasn't able to determine game length since it was unclear how far I'd gotten. Although I possibly stopped early, who knows? Maybe there's a lot more to episode 1 than meets the eye!

There's an air of mystery round e? and I think it could have been a promising project, but it misses some of the things that make the exploration in yume-nikki style games at least a little interesting.

These types of games live or die by their graphics -- if you're going to wander endlessly, it helps when there's varied environments to wander in. The monochromatic look is stylish, and in particular the animated statues are lovely, but once you make it past the initial set of puzzle rooms you're in a less visually interesting area that has a very small number of rooms you can explore. The combo of uninteresting level design, a slow walking speed, and few places to explore made me less inclined to continue after about 30 minutes of trying to find something to interact with.

After taking a peek through the image files I didn't find anything that suggested effects were available, so I decided to stop playing. I seemed to have reached as far as I was able to go, although the readme mentioned something about "that" door puzzle that sounded like something I hadn't encountered.

Again, it's totally possible that there's more to this and I missed something that would let me advance, so here's something of a walkthrough to reach the point that I did:



Maybe you can unravel the mystery of e?