It's clear where Elys draws inspiration from - The Witch's House. And since The Witch's House is one of my favorite rpg maker games of all time, I was excited to jump into Elys, as I've always been fond of the concept of abuse of gameovers so much so to the point where it's funny, and the inventory based puzzles. Elys did not disappoint, for the most part, but it came with a few little flaws.

As per usual I'll start by going over the game's graphical aspect. Elys has some nice aesthetics. The watermark filter works for the most part, except maybe for the character sprite who looks a little weird because of her hair. However, there are a lot of poor gfx choices with the sprites. Namely, we have the FSM main character sprite, who is taller than the chibi ghost sprites but shorter than the Jeff the Killer sprite. *sighs* yes, Jeff the Killer is in the game. And it gets worse.



Other than that, graphics are mostly fine, though the blood is a little poorly drawn.
The music in the game is nice, and surprisingly not that loud considering this is an rpg maker game.

Moving onto the gameplay aspect, one thing I really liked was how interaction was implemented. When you interact with an object, you can choose to examine, collect, or use an item on it. This is also used well in a way that sometimes you have to examine something before you can take what is inside, and near the beginning you actually die for trying to ''collect'' from a pot without examining first. When you examine, it is revealed that there are scorpions inside and that you need an item to get what's in the pot.
Alongside this, there are some nice scenes. I really liked the parts with the five fragments you had to collect, and the rooms they took you to. The jumpscares were well done, and while they weren't too scary, they were still a whole lot better than just ''BOO SCARY FACE IN YOUR FACE.''
I do have some complaints though. For one, sometimes the game takes a lot of time to load. The screen fades out for 3-5 seconds and death scenes take VERY long to display, so you better get ready to press F12 a lot.
The controls can get a little unresponsive, especially in the Mad Hatter mode. Not only is the ''hand'' hard to move because it doesn't move smootly, but sometimes despite pressing space, it doesn't do anything. This was mostly an issue in the scene with the bunnies since I had the ''hand'' on them and I was mashing space, but that wasn't bumping them.
My last complaint is that it is easy to get lost at times. I feel like the game doesn't always give you enough directions for you to know what to do and where to go. The keys you get usually have names like ''Puppet Key'' but that's all the hint you are gonna get as to what door it unlocks. It would help if the door had a puppet drawing on it or something, as it would make things much easier.

I actually had to replay through the game a few times. Well, not the entire thing, but rather mainly the beginning. I was doing an lp and I realized I wasn't logged into bandicam, so it only recorded for 10 minutes and then stopped. I realized my mistake and replayed those ten minutes, now logged in. I got 30 minutes into the game and realized it had a version 1.4 which removed a scene with nudity. That was good since youtube isn't particularly fond on nudity. So, I downloaded that version and replayed it. I beat the game with the ''Unnamed Ending'' and ''Bad Ending'' and then replayed the entire thing for the ''Good Ending'' and the ''Complete Ending.''
Luckily, it's actually not that painful to replay if you know what to do! In fact, this is one of the few times where I did not mind replaying the entire game for the other endings. It helps that the game isn't that long, because if it was a very long game, I'd hate to have to replay it MULTIPLE times for different endings. I'm looking at you, Pocket Mirror.



The last issue I had with the game was that the story wasn't really clear beyond...



I feel like there's more to the game and that I'm just missing it, which I hope is the case because otherwise we basically have a case of ''good game ruined by poor story.'' And while I understand that the game is supposed to have good gameplay rather than a good story, I still expected a good twist ending since that's how these The Witch's House esque games usually end (ex: The Hunt had an amazing twist ending, Red Book's ending was really good and so on)

Overall I definetly recommend Elys, and I would recommend it even more had those little flaws not been there. I give it three and a half fnaf puppets out of five.