Nairi: Rising Tide Review – Puzzling all night long

And finally, accessibility. Rising Tide doesn’t offer much accessibility. Which is unfortunate. While it’s somewhat understandable since it was made by an indie team, it would be nice if accessibility was given a slight priority. Although the controls are simple, there is no way to bind the buttons should you need them. And similar to the hint system, the settings are not explained with the individual functions. There is an icon next to each setting. Some are quite simple: a rectangle with two arrows in the top and bottom corners indicates the screen size, and a globe icon with flags indicates the language. But some don’t make sense. For the sound, there is a musical note that suggests music. But there is a speaker icon, but does that show the overall volume? Sound effects? The last symbol is a speech bubble, which presumably means the dialogue volume.

Another minor annoyance is that there is no way to view dialogue history unless you are not in the conversation. At first I assumed there was no story at all. Only later, when accessing the book that Nairi has, is there a button to view the history of the conversation. While the focus isn’t necessarily on accessibility, there’s no way to switch to the pause menu during a conversation. Which can get annoying after a while. Therefore, you have to skip the discussion to get to the menu. Sometimes you may skip unimportant dialogues or dialogues that take too long. Experiences like these don’t require much accessibility, but there are ways to improve them.

Nairi: Rising Tide is frustrating. This is disappointing because the art style is great and the writing is funny. But it’s the core mechanics of the puzzle that can get annoying. A week after release, HomeBearStudio finally released a walkthrough for the two main puzzles, which became a lifesaver when progressing through the second puzzle dungeon. But for the development team it feels strange himself to publish a walkthrough. This could mean that they are aware of the flaws and future titles they are working on will have updated mechanics; The cliffhanger hints that a third game is planned, so hopefully they learn from Rising Tide’s mistakes.