The Academy: The First Riddle is a brand new puzzle game by Pine Studio who is a pretty-established developer in the puzzle game genre. They are based in Croatia and are the developers behind the Faraway and The Birdcage franchises. Their brand new title The Academy: The First Riddle takes its inspiration from two franchises that are pretty well-known to us, Professor Layton and Harry Potter. This is our review of the Steam version of The Academy: The First Riddle in which we put on our smart hats and solve some puzzles while digging deep in a mystery.
The Academy: The First Riddle starts off with a cool looking exam for your entrance to the school known as Albor’s Academy. You step in the shoes of Sam who is taking his entrance exam as he is seeking admission to the academy. However, right before the very first exam, Sam is starting to solve puzzles such as finding the missing parts of a broken pencil. This is a very simple puzzle however it is a very important one because it is setting your standard for the rest of the puzzles of the game. After the initial puzzle, you are given your admission test which is a simple odd math question along with its bonus questions.
Puzzles in The Academy: The First Riddle comes in two parts. There is the main puzzle that is required for game progression while if you are feeling lucky, you can try your luck at its advanced question as well which is optional but completing them surely gives you a sense of achievement that you are smarter than you actually think. After gaining admission to the school, you are settled in after your tour and then your normal routine begins in the school. When I mentioned The Academy: The First Riddle is a puzzle game, I really meant it.
Everything in the game is done in the form of puzzles. I mean that even your bag unpacking is a puzzle mini-game. The game throws so many puzzles at your face that you will find it weird in real-life when your fridge does not throw a puzzle in your face when you go for a cold drink. As you spend time in your new academy, you make new friends with Dom and Maya. Dom is a red-haired boy who is not very good at being smart while Maya is more of the brains of the group with the obvious answers to everything. Both of them will instantly remind you of Ron and Hermione from the Harry Potter franchise.
You also have plenty of other people in the game however you will be mostly spending your time with Dom and Maya. Dom’s father is also an inventor and you often get to fix his inventions for him because for some reason the inventor is not smart enough to fix them himself. The main plot of the game begins to unfold when different inventions of the founder of the school begin to operate on their own and thus the Sam and the duo comes into play as heroes as you puzzle your way to the end of the dark mystery. This sudden transition of the story is good and you will actually love watching the environment change around you.
The art style of the game is brilliant while the exploration is fun as well. Although there is not much to do apart from the game story of the game, interacting with different objects around you give you more detail about the school and enrich you with more lore of the game. For a game that has such shallow character development, I certainly enjoyed exploring the school and its premises. It really makes you feel like you are exploring an actual school and not just some boring place in a video game. The robotic dialogue delivery by in-game characters however does not help much in making the school feel like home.
You do however find some random side quests in a bid to help out fellow school fellows but they are just dishing out more puzzles or some are item-grabbing quests where you simply have to go to a location and get items and bring them back. They hardly feel like they add some value to the main story of the game. However, if you depend heavily on hints for the puzzles, completing them and general exploration could be rewarding as you get chocolates that help you with hints for the in-game puzzles. They apparently increase your focus in the game allowing you to solve puzzles.
Sadly, the puzzles fail to impress in the end and because of them, the game overall feels pretty empty. With the strong start it offers, the more you play the game, the duller and boring it starts to feel. Completing the final chapter of the three-part story actually feels like a drag as you are tired of solving glitchy and buggy puzzles over and over again. I enjoyed exploring the setting of the game while for me, the art style was brilliant. However, the story lacked depth and characters were just mindless robots. They felt empty and without any purpose and sometimes just felt like filler characters moving around with you. There is no actual bonding with them as friends, unlike Harry Potter where the characters actually felt useful and with some depth.
Final Verdict:
The Academy: The First Riddle starts off really strong and during my first hour, I was greatly enjoying the game. The school design is good while the visuals look pretty much similar to the games where it takes its inspiration from. However, the longer I spent time in the game, the more I started to feel annoyed and in the end, downright boring. The puzzles start to lose their interest factor and some of the puzzles in the game are just plain wrong or at least their wording is wrong. The scoring system does not really work and you can blind-guess your way through each and every puzzle if you do not really want to bother with the game. There is no actual work done on the 3D design of the and despite having various tools at your disposal, you are left with simply choosing the right answers or as simple as dropping pins. It would have looked amazing if these puzzles were more interactive. Overall, the setting is decent, visuals are good and your initial hours in the game would not go wasted. Completing this game starts feeling like a chore that you do not really enjoy doing. If the developers want to release a sequel, they should really give fan-feedback importance because the game has potential however its execution is not in the right direction. I can’t really say I recommend the title but if you still want to give it a shot, you can do so at the game’s Steam page.
Final Score: 6.0/10
