The Old Tree Review

The Old Tree is a cinematic puzzle adventure game where you’re helping an alien baby to his new life.

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That… is pretty much exactly what this game is. While I’m normally fine with point-and-click titles, which is what The Old Tree is, it felt… off to me. Perhaps it was because once you solve a puzzle, all you could do is watch as your little guy made his way to the next puzzle. Even now I’m still trying to figure out what I played.

Several of the puzzles felt unintuitive to me. Click this spot, proceed. Flip all these switches, proceed. But wait, one is (very poorly) hidden! There wasn’t really any exploration, since the entire thing was on rails.

The Old Tree is also extremely slow… funny, since the game is so short. I guess they needed to find some way to try and drag out the play time, huh? You will spend a lot of time just watching… and waiting… and waiting… and then waiting even more. Did I mention waiting? In fact, one puzzle even involves waiting for an item to slowly go down a line until it 2015-02-03_00001makes it to the pot. The puzzle being that you need to stop the fly from stealing it. And then you have to watch the cook slowly walk away, in which you follow… slowly.

So while this game is short, clocking in at around 20 minutes, it feels dragged out. I STILL don’t know what was actually going on, especially since you are sort of just plopped in at the start and have to “hatch” your little alien baby (in other words, click on him). There’s nothing wrong with games being even shorter – The Plan is a great example. That title is EXTREMELY short, but at least it doesn’t feel dragged out… and you even have incentive to play it again!

Is The Old Tree worth installing and trying? Sure, maybe. It really doesn’t take long and it’s free. It really is extremely slow though. The animations could do with a massive upgrade, and some puzzles could do with a little fixing to make it actually easier to know what to do (or some a little harder). It’s definitely a try for yourself game, but the biggest downpoint is again… the speed. I’d replay it to maybe try and figure it out a little more, but I don’t know if I could handle that movement speed again. Also, it’s on rails.

The Old Tree Review Score

2.5/5

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