Inua - A Story in Ice and Time

I downloaded Inua before a long weekend cabin stay because the art style and themes looked like my aesthetic. I enjoyed most of the storyline but found the game ultimately disappointing. Let’s start at value for money. When compared to titles like Life is Strange and the original Oxenfree, Inua seriously lacks in play time per dollar. Even more when you factor in how much richer the interactivity, plot complexity, and especially character development these other games are. The characters in Inua are extremely one-dimensional and have no growth throughout the game. The gameplay is more of a graphic novel than a game, since you just click objects on screen to unlock more thoughts and dialogue between the smattering of side characters in a completely deterministic fashion. Which is fine, but not for the quality of dialogue you get. It felt like the writers had a cool idea for a story and the characters were flat and empty vessels to mechanically carry that story forward. The voice actors were mixed but with the writing as bad as it was it doesn’t matter how good they were or weren’t. Again, I liked the setting a lot, I thought the art was beautifully minimalist while still giving rich color and texture, the music was ethereal and added to the overall feel, and the story setup was super intriguing. Unfortunately, they couldn’t deliver on the promise of the story, and without spoiling the end for future players, it ended anticlimactically with some noble savage ancient earth wisdom theme that felt tone deaf at best and mildly racist at worst. Overall, this might be worth it for you if you don’t have an attachment to your $5, and want a graphic novel to walk you through a beautiful world where the story is secondary and the characters are less than tertiary.

I love this game and I think it was totally worth the money! There are a lot of mysteries that you can solve and I love that you can interact with things and people. There are some mysteries that are really hard to solve, but I think that is what makes it fun. I wasn't having any problems with the gameplay, and I wasn’t experiencing any lag or bugs that need to be fixed at all! I love the soundtrack, and I think it goes perfectly with the game. I also love the story behind all of the mysteries.

I had saved this game for a long flight with no wifi and had no idea how entranced I would be. What incredible illustrations! What innovative gameplay! What a dark but important story! Truly, this game should have gotten many rewards. Yes the "gameplay" is really just a mechanism to tell the story, but it does so in a way that I have never encountered before. So many apps are just bad copies of each other: there are few as innovative as this one. Well done, I hope to see more work from this company. Thanks for making the game!