'The Eyes of Ara succeeds in providing just the right balance of difficulty in its puzzles while expertly weaving them into the environment. 'There's a delicate balance that needs to be met when developing a quality puzzle game.

Turn to the left and look up to find a gargoyle face. Tap it and its eyes will glow green. Also, to the left, find and open the book called History & Legend. There’s two clues in there that you need to solve ceiling puzzles in the other rooms.

If the puzzles are too easy, players may become bored and stop playing. If they're too difficult, they may become frustrated and walk away. There also needs to be a sense of purpose, of course, to drive players forward in the form of a narrative or overarching goal. If done well, these games can be a rewarding experience and provide the sense of accomplishment that comes with solving difficult problems. The Eyes of Ara, the debut title from 100 Stones Interactive, aims to strike that balance with a focus on environmental storytelling.

You take on the role of a contractor for a telecommunications company sent out on a remote job: find the source of a signal that's been interfering with over-the-air communications throughout the area and put a stop to it. It's a simple enough task, until you realize that the source of the signal has been pinpointed inside an abandoned castle. That castle is where you'll spend the entirety of your time with The Eyes of Ara, unraveling a mystery closely tied to your task that unfolds before you as you hunt down the rogue interference. The Eyes of Ara lacks a traditional narrative and, much like other puzzle-based graphic adventure games it's modeled after, the story is told through interacting with the environment. Information about the mysterious 'Eyes', as well as the most recent occupants of the castle, is slowly revealed by reading documents scattered throughout its rooms. As you explore the castle, you learn more about the last tenants — a researcher and some of his family members — from the writings they've left behind.

Their characters aren't particularly deep, but the telling of their time in residence adds a bit of depth to the castle's history rather than just having you explore a bland, lifeless, and empty game setting. The overarching tale of the Eyes is told through the notes left by the researcher regarding his efforts to understand them.

There's even a story reason for why the castle is laced with puzzles throughout, which was a little flimsy but a nice touch. The story itself is mostly average, but the game's execution of this environmental storytelling is spot on and adds to the sense of mystery and discovery that its visuals cultivate. One gripe I have about how The Eyes of Ara chooses to tell its story is that, despite the many documents scattered throughout the castle to piece together the narrative, there isn't any kind of player journal that records what you find. You have to go back to previous rooms and click on each document if you want to read them again. This extends to the various notes and scribbles you find related to puzzles.

I found myself taking pictures of them with my phone after a while so I didn't have to keep trekking back to look at them. This hearkens back to the days of keeping your own notes while playing games, sure, but it doesn't really make sense why the player-character can't simply pocket the notes in-game. Speaking of puzzles, there are plenty in the Eyes of Ara that vary in both complexity and cleverness. There are some logic puzzles, some 'guess and check' puzzles, and some that are so incredibly simple you may overthink them.

The puzzles and environments are well-integrated and require you to be aware of your surroundings. A hand-scribbled note here, a picture there, and a seemingly innocuous book entry may all be pieces to a larger puzzle. The Eyes of Ara pulls these more complex puzzles off fantastically, and there were moments when I felt genuine satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment when I figured out the solution to a head scratcher. That doesn't mean there aren't issues with some of the puzzles, however. The game has moments when things temporarily devolve into hidden object mode.

There are a handful of times when a vital piece of a puzzle is an object that's so well-blended into the environment it's tough to see. There was one instance in particular near the very end of the game that frustrated me to no end because I could not figure out how to move forward. It turned out that I didn't see a well-hidden object within the environment. Its position was such that even clicking around everywhere and on everything, a tactic to which you never want your players to resort, didn't help. Though these moments are rare, and admittedly could be blamed on me and my aging eyes, they pulled me out of the experience nonetheless. The Eyes of Ara's visuals are quite beautiful.

Although the game's four main areas are all inside the castle, they each have their own distinct look and feel. The amount of detail put into each of the rooms within those areas, from floor to ceiling, is readily apparent as you explore. The one issue I did have with the visuals was that the text within some of the documents was a little hard to read and could use a bit of sharpening. The music is well done and fits the atmosphere of mystery and exploration perfectly.

I wish there was more of it, though the game seems to skew towards minimalism in this aspect. Additionally, the music often seems to cut in and out for no discernible rhyme or reason. The Eyes of Ara succeeds in providing just the right balance of difficulty in its puzzles while expertly weaving them into the environment. While the overall story is fairly average, it delivers on its intention to tell it through fun, immersive puzzles and top-notch aesthetics. The fact that this title was developed by essentially one man in Ben Droste is fascinating and makes one wonder what he could accomplish with a dedicated development team.

Hopefully we won't have to wait too long to find out.This review is based on a free review copy provided to RPGFan by the developer. This relationship in no way influenced the reviewer's opinion of the game or its final score.© 2016 100 Stones Interactive. All rights reserved. © 1998—2020 RPGFan Media, LLC.

The Eyes of Ara takes clear inspiration from games like Myst: it is set in an oppressive and isolated environment, there’s a central enigmatic mystery driving you through, and the puzzles are devious and well-constructed. It initially released on PC in 2016 and is only now making its way to Switch. The transition from mouse and keyboard hits some major stumbling blocks, but if you don’t have a PC and are looking for some satisfying brain teasers on the go, you could do much worse.The premise is initially fairly straightforward; you are sent to investigate a remote, abandoned castle to stop this persistent radio signal emanating from the place. Along the way you’ll learn about the mad scientist occupant, his family, and their connection to his bizarre creations. That story is told through letters and diary pages scattered all around the castle. It’s generally well told and intriguing throughout—at least enough to propel me through the various head-scratching puzzles.The puzzles are the meat of this experience, though, and they don’t disappoint (for the most part). Navigating this labyrinthine castle involves simply tapping around the screen.

You can swivel your perspective in all directions, but you are planted in one spot; tapping on a door or distant hallway will transport you to a different scene to investigate. This allows the game to really play with perspectives and hide things in places it knows will be deliberately obscured. It also means that most of your time playing The Eyes of Ara will involve you ceaselessly tapping every pixel on your tiny Switch screen looking for the one clue or hidden collectible you missed.Before I delve deeper into the puzzles and setting, this is where this Switch version really falls behind the PC version. Where on PC you could click around with relative ease, the Switch was simply not designed to be played exclusively as a touch screen.

Even on the Switch Lite I had to hold it in one hand and tap repeatedly and then put the system on a table because my hand got tired of awkwardly holding the system that way. It’s by no means a deal breaker, but know what you’re signing up for (especially if you’ll be playing on the bulkier Switch). There is an alternative to this so you can play the game in docked mode where you use the Joy-Con’s IR sensor to point at the screen and use a cursor in place of your finger, but despite my issues with the touch control-scheme, this just slowed the game way down. It is functional, though.Control issues aside, this game is no slouch in the puzzle department.

It ramps up gradually as you make your way deeper and deeper into the castle. Sometimes you just need to solve a straightforward slide puzzle to unlock a clue, but other times The Eyes of Ara will task you with taking note of specific environmental clues in one room and applying a logic from that to a puzzle in a different room.

Finding those connections and solving the puzzle is rewarding, and usually made me feel much smarter than I actually am. Where this did not work for me was in how it hid its various solutions to some puzzles in random collectibles. Finding a strange pattern on the wall and then finding its counterpart elsewhere was fine because the connection is obvious; it’s merely on you to take note of the similarities. Many puzzles, though, would require a four-digit code to unlock something and that code was not represented in the environment through some connective tissue. It would instead just be placed on one of the myriad pieces of seemingly unrelated collectibles.

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I was stuck for quite some time before I just started throwing ideas at the wall. Like with most puzzle games, perhaps what is difficult for me is not for another person or vice versa, but these seemed needlessly obtuse where much of the rest of the game was so carefully constructed.By the game’s final area these puzzles really begin to test your mettle and become more and more involved. As gratifying as piecing together these grander riddles can be, they really stretch the limits of Eyes of Ara’s navigation. Clicking through to a new screen involves a brief fade out as it transitions to a new area, and clicking on an interactable object swings the camera to focus on the object. When you need to click between a dozen different objects and move between a dozen different screens to piece together a puzzle’s solution the game comes to a screeching halt and each of those transitions becomes tedious. This is exacerbated by the cumbersome menu system. With many puzzles relying on hints written in the notes you collect, you’ll regularly need to refer back to these, but the finicky touch screen controls had me accidentally clicking out of the menu constantly only adding to the slowing momentum of the late game.It’s unfortunate that the system’s limitations put such a hamper on the experience because I genuinely enjoyed exploring this space and solving the greater mystery of this castle and its otherworldly inhabitants.

Some puzzle solutions were a bit too obscure for my liking, but those were few and far between. Additionally, there were tons of side areas and collectibles to find that were all well hidden and fun to track down, only marred by the game’s general malaise in backtracking and navigation.

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