Beating Tartarus is no easy job, but it does not mean that Tartarus was not a great experience. I highly recommend Tartarus if you are up to some challenging puzzle adventure.
Steam is full of independent puzzle games. Some are genuinely great brain-teasers. Others are more divisive attempts at challenging your mind. Tartarus doesn’t try to imitate these titles, instead harkening back to the old pen-and-paper puzzle games.
Playing Tartarus is possibly the closest I’ll ever come to experiencing what it’s like to try and fix something I don’t fully understand. The challenge and frustration didn’t come from trying to figure out what the solution to the problem was. My fellow crewmember almost always told me what I needed to accomplish. No, the trick was always in figuring out how to arrive at that solution. When Tartarus is working well, piecing through each challenge is a slow but rewarding experience that is all too rare in gaming these days. When Tartarus isn’t working, though, it’s the opposite: too much frustration for too little reward. At its core, Tartarus is a fun experience most puzzle game fans would enjoy. That core might have been buried a bit too deeply under small annoyances and at least one big problem, though.
GR writes: "The game is too short, the narrative is incomplete, and the difficulty of the puzzles are so oddly varying as you progress through the game. It's just very frustrating for a studio that is clearly dedicated to their craft."
