Impresja

Impresja is a puzzle game set in a mysterious art museum where nothing seems to ever stay as it is. Machine translation tells me the title is Polish for “impression” — which might be wrong, but it does make sense: the game really is about “a difference made by the action or presence of someone or something“, but also “an effect produced on someone“, because the game had quite the impact on me when I was just minutes into it.

I was impressed by how well everything connected not only locally, but globally. There were some issues, but I’m going to recommend this right away to anyone who likes a challenge.

The puzzles are about moving paintings from one wall to another, passing through security checks with cameras watching your every move. At the same time, the whole museum is like a huge jigsaw puzzle with the rooms being the pieces. You will not be told what to do or where to go, and you might have to trial and error a couple of times before you learn the rules, but once you do, things will get a lot easier. A good visual memory will help. Colour and the tracing of lines play an important role too.

The art style is low-key: clean, calm, minimalistic. Lots of white, but also colour where it counts. The music is electronic ambience with no beat to speak of except your own footsteps.

I had the most fun with the first three quarters. Even if the last quarter was a bit of a relief, it was also the least fun, because the focus switched from more thinking and less chores to less thinking and more chores.

The only real bug I ran into was when right-clicking an easeled painting and then a figure who was holding another painting, but clicking the held painting instead of the figure: this resulted in the game entering an infinite loop, which meant I had to force the game to quit and restart. At least autosaving was frequent enough to not make me lose any progress.

Full review:
https://maskinkultur.com/2018/04/29/review-impresja/

Loved this game! I wish there were more like it - Unique, Creative, Thought-provoking, Challenging, Non-Violent, Colorful and Extremely Artistic. 👍👍👍😍 I do hope there is a sequel ;-) 😉

waste of time.
firstly frustrating then boring

Some tutorial would be nice, since player has to spend too much time figuring out what is going on here and what to do next. It does not encourage to progress.

What else is there to say that others haven't? The third puzzle is prohibitehively hard. You may just run around for hours trying to figure it out without getting anywhere. This is caused by how hard it is to tell at a glance which painting corresponds to which location, by all the beam-redirecting pillars that redirect beams only into useless locations, the fact that you can put paintings only in specific spots, and you can't swap the one on the wall for the one in your hand either. It's the level that caused the majority of that three-hour playtime you see there, and I'm the kind of person who thought Manifold Garden was not very hard.

Works also on Linux if you install Steam for Windows on Wine.

"Simply" Outstanding. This Game defines the term "computer game". A non violent adventure in unique surroundings. Excellent atmosphere and design. I didn't read too many reviews about it, wanting to experience the game on my own, and it really is worth it. Very calming and entertaining, as one tries to get anywhere really, but it's not that easy😉😍🤩💖

Great puzzle game that is similar to anti-chamber but has completely new mechanics and puzzles which are very good at using all mechanics you have learned moving forward. Of course I would want more of this game and even more mechanics to make a incredibly head scratching puzzle and I hope more of this type of game is made!

Impresja is a decent little puzzle game, well priced for its 3-4 hour length. A lot of the difficulty is in wrapping your head around the mechanics without explicit explanations, but once you know how the puzzle pieces interact solving the overall puzzle becomes a matter of moving things around in the right sequence.

Which is actually the biggest flaw in the game. The final puzzle is especially tedious and takes up a good chunk of time not because it is clever or difficult, but because you literally run around a circle doing the exact same three things over and over again. It is not about demonstrating your understanding of the level and the mechanics in it.

That said I still recommend Impresja. It's cheap with some good ideas which I think are worth experiencing.

And if you need some help with the third(?) area, with the infinity symbol on the ceiling, remember that only landscapes/wide pictures can go on easels and that they act VERY differently from the portrait/tall pictures.

I feel on the fence about this game. In the end, i can't say i recommend this game. here is why :

movement speed = way too slow. many of the puzzles have you running from point A to B over and over. even figuring out what to do was made tedious by what became the slow casual walk.
if there was an option to make the move speed much faster the game would have been much better.


the level design and pace was all over the place.
almost as if the scaling for how hard the puzzles should be was out of order.

lack of hand holding : while most of the time this is a good thing, you still need to teach your player how to play the game. i feel some of things you could do in the game were not clear and the puzzles were easy. what i mean is, for one of the puzzles i spent more time figuring out what i could do, instantly knew what i needed to do once i actually understood what i could do.

while some of the core aspects of this game were good, there was just as much bad design that lacked polish. i guess you could say i was not impresja.

I really, really wanted to like this game. It reminded me visually of antichamber, and the puzzles seemed top notch as well. When you hang a painting on the wall, a "sight line" is emitted. If the sight lines of two paintings touch, the level rearranges itself so that the areas depicted by the paintings are now adjacent. As it stands, this would be a puzzle worthy of inclusion in antichamber. The problem is that, you cannot hold two paintings at once. This means you need to find a blank space (you cannot hang the paintings just anywhere) to hang one painting, so that you can pick up a second. This turns an otherwise interesting mechanic into a fetch quest. I burned out so badly, I am simply going to try and get this refunded and move on.

Way too hard. I bought this game, because I liked "Antichamber" very much and wanted to play games, that are like Antichamber. I thought, this would be a bit like Antichamber and I bought it, but it is just way too hard and doesn't make fun at all.

I didn't have the patience for it. There's not much to draw you in...no exposition, no instructions, just a white environment that is simple.

It's a lot like Antichamber puzzle wise, but that game is a lot better. This one feels almost like the developer played Antichamber and was like "That was fun! I wanna try to make that, too," and crapped this out.

Six-ish short-ish puzzles. The closest way I can think of to describe it is a 3D analogue of Recursed with the aesthetic of Antichamber. I hope you skipped watching the trailer, since it's a slight spoiler...

The amount of walking you'll probably need as you try to understand the puzzles (and later on, just solving the puzzles) is a bit excessive, but the puzzles are still pretty sharp.

And hey, it's $3.

Creating a puzzle game is difficult, and I definitely appreciate all the effort that Adam has put in.
Now to two issues I've had with the game:

Pacing. It's very difficult to pace game correctly, you have to account for things player got and things player still needs to understand. This game is not paced well, it doesn't allow you to experiment with your new found abilities in a safe manner and instead thrusts you into the unknown. It can be enjoyable for some, but I found myself frustrated and stuck more than I could take.
Level-design. This one is closely bound with previous point I've made, walking speed means that to do something you know how to do you're required to walk around slowly, and if your action is wrong, undoing it would cost you time. I don't when game punishes me with more playtime, it shouldn't be a threat looming over me but a reward I'm enjoying.

Overall game has great idea behind it, but it doesn't lend this idea to gradual discovery and bashes you with it instead.

Impresja, for the first hour or so, will impres' ja' (pun entirely intended). Then for the next hour, it won't. And for the final remaining hour, it'll infuriate/bore you. It brought something new to the table, then it ruined itself with two annoying levels.

Part of the fun of Impresja is discovering the mechanics, as the game only tells you that you can move around with WASD, interact with the mouse buttons, and that the game saves automatically; after that it chucks you straight into the puzzles and you have to figure out what to do with it all. So I won't spoil what the big mechanics of the game are. However, it's very much related to non-Euclidean levels (which we all love!), and does produce a few nice puzzles based around it. I'll say this much, though: you can take paintings and put them onto easels and walls, and this does certain things things.

The first two puzzles were challenging and enjoyable. They stuck to themselves and didn't try to mislead the player. They presented a situation involving the mechanics of the game, and required logical reasoning to get through. The mechanics themselves were also presented clearly and were fairly-introduced. This is good. The developer should read this and keep that in mind for the next game.

The bad level design starts to show in the next puzzle, however. This one's in two parts, and both have annoying red herrings that have no bearing on the puzzle whatsoever, but are instead put there for you to seemingly waste your time on. Let's just say this: in this game, pillars can be reconfigured in certain ways, but in both parts of this third puzzle, a great deal of these pillars *look* as though they should be configured in one way (involving point-of-interest A), whereas in fact point-of-interest A isn't part of the solution to the puzzle. At all. And the pillars that are *actually* used are a different set from the ones in the point-of-interest A configuration. Why not simply *remove* point-of-interest A, and the unnecessary pillars?! Red herrings in a game are almost always unfair! Even worse, the actual solution to the puzzle involves using something that *isn't* a pillar to connect the two parts, which is completely counter to one's expectations.

Further, at this point, the fact that you HAVE to place paintings onto specific points on the wall (and never on the floor) means that in this puzzle, you'll end up wandering around trying to find the one specific spot on the wall where you can place a painting so that you can free up your hands to shuffle paintings back and forth. Combined with the slow walking speed and long passageways, this becomes a bit of a chore. Oh, and you also have to backtrack all the way through the first and second levels to solve this one. I would *never* design a level that took this long to complete or which mislead the player this badly. While it's cool that the puzzle *does* use elements from the previous levels, the problem with backtracking is that it takes too long to get through those previous levels.

Either way, supposing you do indeed manage to solve that level, you're then presented with a fairly easy puzzle next. A puzzle that in fact would have fit perfectly as the first puzzle in the game, were it not for the inter-level interplay. Though now that I say that, I'm not entirely convinced about it; it feels to me like restructuring the game to make that the next puzzle would actually be a lot easier than I initially thought. Either way, this puzzle was still enjoyable and I'll praise the developer for it.

So now you're at the fifth puzzle, which introduces its mechanic well and is fun. Again, praise to the developer for this one, huzzah!

Then you get to the sixth puzzle. And this is where the level design goes straight out the window. This puzzle involves a circular corridor, with entrances on the inside of the corridor leading into rooms, and one-way drops on the outside coming from... well, that's one issue. Only one of those one-way drops can actually be accessed; the rest are all useless and probably shouldn't be there. But more pressingly, there are a total of 8 rooms on the inside of the corridor, and you have to move paintings between these rooms to complete the puzzle (and finish the game). The problem is that you can't see what's in these rooms until you're right in front of the entrance, and with the slow walking speed it takes ages to get from one room to another. Further, moving the wrong painting to the wrong room is a mistake and will likely need to be undone.

The way *I* would have designed this level is to instead have the circular corridor be a central room, with exits leading out to the 8 rooms. The one-way drop could be a drop from the ceiling, and the main exit out from the corridor could be marked differently. That way, the player can see all the rooms at once and can see what's in each room, so there's now no need to run around the corridor for literal minutes, trying to find the right painting and the right room.

Even having done that, the puzzle itself is still pretty tedious and probably needs to be nerfed. Basically, moving the paintings allows you to move the statues in the rooms from one room to another. The problem is that they need to be moved in a specific order between rooms, and there's only ever one statue-less room to move a statue into.

Despite all this ridiculousness, I was still hoping for more good quality puzzles after this one. But then the game ended straight after, leaving me unsatisfied and wanting more puzzles with good level design. Why couldn't you have had more puzzles based on the mechanics of the first two?! I really liked those puzzles; they showed such promise and got me to really think about them! Instead, you gave me puzzles that were overcomplicated and badly-presented. The difference between the good puzzles and the bad is quite truly night and day here.

At the time of writing, the other negative reviewer on this game thinks that the developer forgot to have their game playtested. I think it's definitely possible that the four levels I mentioned that were good WERE playtested, because they were honestly good levels; they were well-thought-out and were fun. But I can't help but feel that the other two puzzles *didn't* have playtesters test them, and so the game's suffered badly as a result. Had those two levels been cut out entirely, I wouldn't just give this a positive rating; I would wholeheartedly recommend this to my puzzler friends.

In short, Impresja is a good and ambitious game at heart, but 1/3 of its levels mar it with overcomplicated design, red herrings, and bad presentation. It has good mechanics and good introductions to the mechanics, but fails to follow through with enough good levels to match. Get it only if you have a lot of patience.

If the developer is willing to completely replace the offending levels, I'd be very happy to update this review as required, because I really really wish this game were better and did well as a result. But as it is now, it's a "Not Recommended" from me.

EDIT: Also, shame on the developers of Flow Match (now known as Soko Match) and Rolling Shapes, because their games are literally Satan's diarrhoea.

This game is... interesting. It wants you to feel out the mechanics but the mechanics are non-obvious enough and they're only ever introduced the moment you need them to solve a larger puzzle. Like, you get to the third area and everything is fine but unless you can work out what the mechanic introduced in that section is you will end up completely stuck; yet once you figure it out the solution is really easy. The game also mixes self-contained areas with the overall game map in ways that are kind of annoying - this is seen again primarily in the third and last areas, with all the other areas being completely self-contained, making it hard to figure out what the game intends when you're not sure if you're stuck because you don't understand the current puzzle or just because you need to do something in a different area. And as well, the final puzzle is... a super tedious and overly long fetch quest that requires no thinking, it's just "find the specific painting you need out of about 10 and put it in the correct room out of 10" about a dozen times. And the ending is very unsatisfying when you do reach it, as a result.

Gripes aside though the puzzles themselves are clever and the game does instill that "aha" moment all good puzzle games should strive to create. Seeing all the pieces fit in to place (when you understand how they work) makes solving puzzles actually feel like an accomplishment (well, again, except for that last one) and due to the non-euclidean nature of the game map it's hard to tell how much is left to explore until you get close to the end (at which point you have basically been everywhere except for the very final room). It's also kind of exhausting to play though, since it requires both logical thinking and working out the game mechanics at the same time. It's not a long game, took me under 5 hours to beat and knowing what you're doing perfectly I bet you could clear this in 10-15 minutes. And the mechanics themselves are kind of clever too, it certainly doesn't feel much like any other game I've played. Yes, it's very aesthetically similar to antichamber, and it's non-euclidean as well, but the games don't have any similarities beyond that.

For the price I'd say it's worth it, it's not a perfect game and can be a bit frustrating at points but it's still pretty enjoyable and doesn't overstay its welcome much. Again, though, that end section is really dumb, I have no clue what they were thinking there.

I think the dev forgot to have their game playtested is the thought I was left with after playing.

You're dropped in without any explanation of how the mechanics work. This leads to trial and error from the get-go and this trend continues upon progression.

Now, I appreciate the surreal look of the game and the unique gamepaly, unfortunately it becomes too abstract for its own good. You're trying to grasp your head around pairing paintings in order to create paths so that you can get a guarded painting out in order to pair it with something else and create an exit, but certain combinations make loops and things can get convoluted. This can be especially seen when there are more than a couple branching paths leading to multiple rooms within a section (by section I mean an area with new music).

The first two sections aren't that bad, but upon entering the third section the difficulty spikes up and you're left to move around trying even more cominations over and over.

To add to injury you cannot run. While the character doesn't move that slow, the feature would of been nice to have. Also, do those hallways in the infinity room really need to be that long?

In essence, as said before, the abstract nature of the game (while nice to look at) ultimately seems to detract from the gameplay. The surreal mechanics along with their combinations can create a mental block which leads to alot of trial and error.

After solving the first two areas I had a slight idea of what I was doing, but when the path opened up I still didn't know how it came to be.

Lastly, I don't know if the gameplay stays the same but it does get monotonous moving paintings over and over after a while with the fact that paintings can only be hung on an empty space. I can only assume the are more colors but that's about it...

Very impressive little puzzle game from a lone developer. Throws you in at the deep end with no hints at all. You have to discover for yourself how everything works. Very satisfying.

Well worth the low cost!

Graphics leave a little bit more to be desired but the unique mechanics make it worth your while.