Originally published on Steam

There's not a lot going for this game other than being short. It's just an unfortunate combination of rotten controls, fairly pedestrian puzzles and a sorta pretentious story.

To describe the controls, imagine Myst where you can freelook in a low-polygon environment. It sounds fine in theory, but the mouse must be used both for looking and for clicking on stuff. Switching between those modes requires holding a mouse button to look. The camera remains stuck wherever you release the button. Sometimes the camera is readjusted when you click on something interesting, but normally you are looking at some random place when you move from one location to another. The whole scheme seems ripped out of the original System Shock, which hadn't figured out how to navigate a 3D environment. Not sure how this could be fixed, but it would have helped if the camera were adjusted in the direction of travel.

The puzzles are maze- and item-based. I'm afraid they are typically either insultingly easy or annoyingly obtuse. There's an alligator puzzle that's mildly interesting.

Now the game would be rescued if it had a clever story or engaging atmosphere. But this is no Thirty Flights of Loving. The short, disjointed story seems to be trying to say something about death, religion, environmentalism, corporate greed and the tedium of working life. It's not very cohesive. It feels like the game designers had an idea of what they wanted to say, but weren't able to pull it off.

I don't hate the game, but Rituals isn't something I'd recommend spending time on.