Some thoughts on 'Pavilion', the stylish fourth-person puzzling adventure

The developer of 'Pavilion' [Humble Store, Steam, Official Site] was kind enough to send in a key to their really stylish fourth-person puzzling adventure, so I took a look.

I really wanted to try out Pavilion due to the rather incredible style to the game, visually it is quite impressive, but the gameplay is not what I expected at all.

You indirectly control a single character through interacting with the environment, but I find the control scheme very clumsy. There's no mouse support at all, so you have to move a pointer around the screen using either the arrow keys or a gamepad, I feel like I would have enjoyed it more if I could just use the pointer with my mouse. I don't get why it isn't an option, just doesn't make sense to me. All you're literally doing is controlling a pointer on the screen, that's it.

Nothing is hard about the game, at all. The mechanics are insanely simple, it's a mix between hitting bells or lights with the spacebar to direct the little man the correct way. Most of the puzzles take seconds to figure out, and I don't consider myself all that smart at the best of times. You don't feel like you're being rewarded in any way for solving the puzzles either, just move onto another room and do some more puzzles and it's rather repetitive.

There's zero exploration, no explanations, no voice over, nothing. It's bland. I get that certain types of games want to create mystery, but going from area to area doesn't feel like it has any purpose.

The game is entirely linear which is a damn shame considering how stylish a world the developers have created.

Massively disappointing. A totally different game to what I expected, I'm often happen to find out a game is different to what I thought, but Pavilion just isn't fun to play. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.