Claire de Lune

I suppose Claire de Lune was another lesson on to maybe consider twice or thrice before buying little known games. The game is (largely) functional but by no means great. All its short-comings compound the frustration of wanting to 100% the game for my average completion rate on Steam. That happening is currently looking improbable due to how sweaty the endeavor is.

Rather basic puzzle adventure

Claire de Lune is a first person puzzle platformer. You play as John who with his titular daughter Claire crash-land on some planet. John and Claire get separated and you spend the game trying to get to her. You have an annoying AI companion Arturo to help you and throughout journey you get upgrades to your nanogun tool to spawn platforming objects such as a cube and a booster.

The platforming is simple puzzle-wise but the gameplay feel is clunky. Sometimes executing an object-assisted jump was immensely difficult even though I (supposedly) knew what I was supposed to do.

Achievement nightmare

While the platforming doesn't require Portal-level puzzle-solving effort, there are a whole lot of hacking mini-games. The game picks randomly from a selection of different layouts for each. One connect-the-pipes on a hex-grid puzzle took me a good while to solve. There's an achievement for getting through each of the mini-games under a minute. I wonder how it works with the game's autosave -- is it possible to save-scum to get the easier ones?

Because Claire de Lune has never had a player base to speak of, no one has written any achievement guides for it. There is one ""100%"" playthrough video on Youtube but, as far as I could tell, it lacks the 'Efficient' achievement which requires beating the game with a minimum number of matter objects spawned. I wish the game told the limit for that; figuring it out yourself would be such a pain. And for a game that is so below par -- absolutely no enjoyment to be had.

Claire de Lune is not the shortest game, either; my first playthrough took nearly 8 hours. A speedrun would be faster, no doubt -- I wonder what the required time is for the related achievement. You have to replay through the game twice already just for the sole reason of it having exclusive yet meaningless dialogue choice-related achievements. Having game-pausing (and boring-ass) dialogue really irks me in a game of this genre. Just have the characters yap instead of taking control away from the player.

Other annoyances include spider-like enemies that instantly kill you. Squishing them with the nano objects is possible but it's not a thing to accomplish in a hurry. Your nanogun doesn't become an actual gun until the very end of the game.

Technical issues of Claire de Lune include the lack of a field of view slider and the game not launching at all on my desktop (!). The latter wasn't problem on my laptop: looking at the log files, things seemed to fail on the step of loading the Steam storefront.

Loading Storefront: STEAM //the last line in the log on the desktop
Steam loading libraries. //...continues on the laptop
Steam checking launcher.
etc.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the game expects Steam to be installed on the C drive, and if that's not the case, it's no go. Claire de Lune runs on Tactics Studios' own Immortal engine so the tinkering of some .ini file being possible is uncharted territory. It's possible it's some unique issue on my desktop but there is also one Steam forum post reporting the game not launching.

Man, I really regret playing this game; I just can't be arsed to pioneer an actual 100% completion of such an unenjoyable title. The silver lining is that the game's incompletion will eventually stop mattering once I have gotten enough 100%'d games to make my average reach 99%. After that, Claire de Lune will be just another inhabitant in my hall of shame with other titles which are incomplete for a reason or another.