A letdown
I was curious what others felt about this game after I finished it, and it seems everyone has fairly similar opinions, falling on one side of a fence or the other, or carefully balancing on the edge. I'm nowhere near the fence.
There are two themes in the game - exploration with a touch of puzzle-solving, and platforming. The latter is atrocious. Instant deaths, infuriating checkpoints (and no quicksave or any kind of manual save), an annoying 'breathing' system, weird friction I never felt like I could trust, irritating jumps, purposely terrible lighting... one example from near the end of the game in particular is a section where you're forced to keep moving, except that if you walk you die, and if you sprint you have to constantly stop while obstacles move out of the way. Also, there was a glitch where the game stuttered after you'd moved about five metres from a checkpoint load, every time.
The puzzles tend to be trivial or irritating (the latter usually when they're reliant on moving light sources that you have no control over), but they were a pleasant change from platforming.
The exploration is mostly good. The visuals and design are fantastic, and the scale of things is great - my only real complaint is the sheer size of some of the areas, especially if you end up going across it more than once (if I spend several minutes to reach an unusual structure, then die instantly by getting near something that was - based on previous gameplay - presumably harmless, I'm not going to bother going back there). I suspect there's at least some choice in the way to get through the levels, though how much of that is just an illusion and how much is actually different is hard to tell (I'm not going to replay it myself to find out). And the lack of hints makes it hard to tell if you're actually progressing or at a dead end. I found a few weird things like a staircase that seemed to descend forever, or another structure that definitely did something; in both cases I couldn't tell if they were puzzles with something extra to find, or just there because they could be. And I don't know if there was meant to be a plot or just a journey across weird landscapes and structures - the only explicit information were the level titles, the very first of which bothered to name the character (never mentioned again), and the very last of which was frankly a silly cliché.
But, as nice as it looked, I kept feeling like I'd seen it before. Portal without the characters, Q.U.B.E. without the interesting puzzles, Kairo without the plot, QBeh-1 without the decent autosaves (as far as I remember), Antichamber without the self-awareness. For me at least, each of those did their parts better, and the combination in NaissanceE didn't work.
In fact, whether you enjoyed this or didn't, if you haven't played Kairo you should. NaissanceE's apparent similarity was the main reason I played it, and frankly I think Kairo did it a lot better. Unless your favourite bit was the platforming, in which case Kairo is probably not for you. Try DeadCore maybe.
Followup, some days later: I'm changing my score from two to three stars. First, I've had some time to calm down, and I discovered some helpful console commands. I took a new trip through with my weakly-godlike abilities and, able to bypass the worst sections and take a better look at the scenery, left with better impressions. I still feel that the game would be better with more of a narrative, even if it wasn't spelled out explicitly, and that the platforming hurts the game enormously... but the view is perhaps worth the effort after all.
