A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ATMOSPHERE AND GRAFFICS

The beginning of the game was pretty specific. You wake up in something kind of stone bath full of water or maybe it’s a coffin? Turn around – you can see that the main character is a woman on the wall behind you. Everything around you looks like hundred years before now. All of it is medieval.Aporia: Beyond The Valley Review
Firstly, player sees beautiful and gorgeous gardens, with big trees, stone buildings and realistic waterfalls around him. Walking there feels like walking through the paradise. The morning atmosphere changes into the night. Everything becomes more beautiful when the sun goes down. Sunset in this game is the trifle I really liked. It was pleasure to me when the rain started to fall on the ground. Water filled everywhere so real.Aporia: Beyond The Valley Review

Calm atmosphere can disappear when you see a lot of skeletons lying around on the ground or sitting on chairs. Feels like it happened suddenly. You starting to realize that everything around you is dead. The atmosphere is as quiet and peaceful as creepy and empty.Aporia: Beyond The Valley Review

SOME STUFF ABOUT MENU AND CONTROL

The main menu is simple as always. It offers you to choose a new game, continue it or load one of 6 slots with your saves. By the way except scripted saves you can save the game whenever you want to those slots. I liked the font of the title, it is special and unique and it corresponds to the game, think it’s pretty mysterious.

Options consist of Control settings, where you can see how to control the main character and set up your comfortable mouse sensitivity;
Graphic settings let you change the view of the game referring to your computer capability or as you wish to play comfortable;
Sound settings, where you can control some kinds of volume.

Down there in the menu you can see all Credits, scrolling it by yourself.

Health status shows really unusual. Choose variant of picture fragments to open gates is comfortable. The main character jumps so high it’s even pretty funny to use jumping like this. If you want to reach the destination quickly you can use “shift” and by the way there is no tiredness at all what is really useful to play in this game.

THE GAMEPLAY

The game needs no language because there are no words inside it. Except the main menu, settings, saves and another stuff like this. The whole storytelling is something special. You don’t need to read at all. You will watch pictures and scenes about the game to understand what it is talking about. And you have to discover them by yourself walking everywhere and finding some story fragments piece by piece.

To continue exploring everything around, you have to find small flasks with bright magic liquid inside. Pour it in your bottle and take it with you. Later it will help to grow healing plants to fill your heath and grow vines to get the high places. Magic liquid can open some locked gates that let you come in another location. You just have to pour some of this liquid into specific stones in front of the gate, after that a little road will shine and open a way to you. It looks amazing by the way. Also your bottle can be used as a flashlight when the night falls.

The gates also can be opened by fragments of different figures. Other characters have got the same shaped necklace. You should put one of them on the gate to form the whole picture after activating the gate by the magic liquid. But you don’t have all of fragments when you start to play. You should find them during the playing. The first location – temple is the place where you have to open a huge gate. To do it you have to find all of necklaces and put them in slots. Outside the temple there are some teleporting gates. You will open them by the same scheme but they won’t show you a new locations they can quickly teleport you to important places.

Puzzles are another way to open gates. The first serious puzzle was pretty simple but really fascinating. You should combine pictures of the sun, and stages of human and plant growth. If you can turn on your logic – you can solve it quickly as I did.
There are some tips in the tunnels so don’t worry you will solve the puzzle.

The water secret I liked the most. First of all I had to find the way to break free water from the rock. That was actually so stressful part of the game. After peaceful scenes which I was watching in the cave I fell down from the bridge which actually was absolutely alright when I got there at first. I should almost have to drown myself to get out of this cave and then the huge stream of water threw me outside. But the good side of it was that I got the water and I could solve another one puzzle. That one is my favorite. It is about water taps. The purpose was to open them in the specific way to bring the water stream in the big stone pool and get to the new fragment of the puzzle. There are 2 schemes of water pipes to solve this puzzle quickly, but I preferred not to look at them. It was actually much funnier to solve it by myself.

Except finding and collecting fragments of figures to open some kind of gates there are a lot of different puzzles in the Aporia. You should search for pieces of broken fresco, find some tiny lights, turn columns in the correct way to open picture which is a part of the story and a lot of exiting things like that.

Is it sounds like peaceful gameplay? Do you think there is no danger around? Yes, firstly there wasn’t. But when the dark Demon suddenly caught me from my back for the first time I was so scared. Actually I was afraid after that too almost all the time of playing the game and walking on quiet locations. Because you realized that there is another someone or even something that can kill you in a second. It was actually safely until that.

There is a level with boat travelling. You can see Demon from the boat but there’s nothing to worry about because you just pass him by. The speed of the boat is constant so you can’t press “shift” to swim faster. After arriving to the coast your target is to hide from Demon and turn off 4 torches. This level I didn’t like.
You are standing on the wooden pretty broken road and you should run, survive and take rocks from torches with you to use them later. Everything is dark here.
You can’t panic or you’ll die. You need to be really calm and focused to quickly find all of them. After all of it you should put all the stolen rocks to another torches and light them with your magic liquid to send the darkness away.

Later you will solve some puzzles with mirrors. You should connect the light reflection from one mirror to another to open gates and go to the next location. Firstly they seemed not so difficult but the last one was really hard and exhausting for me.

After that the game offers you to walk through some tunnels and avoid the Demon. You will find 2 coffins and lie down on the one of them to watch something…

LAST PART OR IS IT ALL?

You’re in the white room. Demon will show you another part of the whole story. You should follow him and see some of storytelling arts in the air. I thought it was the end of the game, but it wasn’t. After chasing him you will see the empty picture and go into it. All the white colors will change into black and you walking and walking and pooof you get up from the coffin and get the last part of the necklace. Now you can put it in the slot and open the big gates into the temple.
Now you’ve got to choose the way to go because the game has got 2 endings.

SAVE EVERYONE OR ESCAPE

The first one is on your left. You can save everybody. Just need to solve the last puzzle and you’ll make them alive.
The second one is on your right. This way is for you to escape. You run away from the temple and take the boat to finish the game.

All I want to say – the game is great.

Surely 9,5/10 because Demon was really stressful and puzzles with mirrors were too much. But after the game ended I wanted to feel that atmosphere one more time and I wanted to start it again. I still want to.