While I have no doubt that the development of games of any kind presents unique challenges to the people making them, I think that titles that lean heavily on smart puzzles of some kind may be the most fraught with potential peril. You certainly don’t want people to be blowing through an experience you meticulously designed without being slowed down in any way, but the risk of setting the bar of expectation too high is that you can lose your audience entirely. On the player end of the equation, the tendency is that you want to be pushed to ponder things to a degree, but frustration will set in quickly if people can’t divine the logic driving a particular challenge. In this light, there’s no question that Looking for Fael has ambition, but with regards to the high wire act of finding the complex puzzling sweet spot it has some struggles.

The central concern driving this puzzling adventure is finding your roommate Fael, who has left you a somewhat odd voicemail as well as a multitude of individual puzzles to be solved. These are all contained in an ever-growing network of rooms that start with your humble apartment, but continue to reveal more as you make progress. The challenge will be to continue to explore, ideally take notes of any details that you discover, and then divine how sometimes actions you take in one place will have a direct impact on another. Unsurprisingly, to a degree your success here won’t only be driven by your powers of deduction, but also by some leaps of faith, and sometimes that’s where the quality of the experience can suffer.

While the feeling of working out a complex puzzle can be enormously satisfying, when things don’t work out the right way they can instead have the opposite effect. Vague clues and logical processes that are unclear, even when you manage to stumble into a solution, tend to just leave an impression of sloppiness, and when you simply feel stuck it’s important for games to have some form of life line to help. Unfortunately, what in-game assistance is provided for in this case is typically little help at all, usually telling you what you already know but failing to help get you over the hump of understanding how to proceed. That feeling of sloppiness also extends to the use of the Game Leaf system which is central to your success, but whose controls are completely unintuitive since you interact with it through a touchscreen interface (you know, like you did with a system driven by a D-Pad and 2 buttons) and there’s nothing explaining what you’re expected to do. You can certainly still choose to soldier on, work things out (or at least look them up in a walkthrough), and enjoy the game, but the degree of unnecessary confusion here with some fundamentals keeps this from reaching the same level as some of its more thoughtfully put together peers.