Strange Antiquities

I enjoyed the first part of *Strange Antiquities* quite a bit. The atmosphere is great, the object-identification puzzles are satisfying, and for a while it felt like the game was hitting a nice middle ground between being too easy and being annoyingly obtuse. Eventually, though, I started getting frustrated for a reason I have with a lot of puzzle games: I wasn’t always struggling with the puzzle itself, I was struggling with understanding what the game would even allow me to do. There’s a big difference between a difficult puzzle and an interface-obscure puzzle. I’m happy to spend time thinking through clues, making connections, and figuring out a solution. What I don’t enjoy is discovering that an object I’ve been looking at for hours secretly has movable parts, or that some tiny part of the screen can be manipulated even though the game never really established that as part of its vocabulary. If I had these objects physically in front of me, I could turn them over, press things, test mechanisms, or try different approaches. In a video game, I only have the actions the developer programmed, so I need some indication of what those actions are. Otherwise the challenge stops being “solve the puzzle” and becomes “guess what the developer made clickable.” That’s where the game started losing me. The actual logic often isn’t especially difficult, but some solutions feel obscure because the interaction rules aren’t communicated clearly enough. I still liked a lot about the game, but I wish it did a better job of making the available tools and interactions obvious, then letting the puzzle itself provide the difficulty.