I played Off-Peak before The Norwood Suite so I kind of knew what I was in for. A trippy experience that wouldn’t always make sense but would hold my interest. That’s pretty much what I got. There is a lot more content to The Norwood Suite than in Off-peak but that isn’t always a good thing. Off-Peak knew how to move things along and keep a good pace but Norwood Suite got bogged down at times. There are quite a few side quests you find and no objective list to keep track of them. There is also no map, and while there are signs to point the way to specific parts of the hotel, it would have been nice to have a map as it was confusing at times. There also was a few hidden passages that really just became like short cuts to areas you could already visit. I will just say that I hated the piano puzzle where you have to play specific notes to open a door in the wall. I could understand what it wanted me to do but nowhere could I find good instructions on which keys were which. I don’t read sheet music or play piano so even knowing which keys need pressing I had no idea which was “a” or “d” etc. Luckily near the end the story started to pick up a bit and it finished strong. The music was fantastic and did a good job setting the mood to the different parts of the hotel. The graphics while only decent benefits from a great art style and use of colour. The sky and cars were good. The road and lighting was decent. The clothes and faces were poor. The game also employed a door opening mechanic similar to Amnesia where you use the mouse to slide things open or shut. I wish developers would start doing this as no one has done it in a way I enjoyed yet.

    I played The Norwood Suite on Linux. It never crashed on me. I did notice one glitch where in one room there was this white object on screen that would follow you around like a flickering texture stuck on the screen making it hard to see. This didn’t occur outside of that room. The load times were pretty slow with the initial loading screen taking up to 30 seconds on my NVME SSD something no other game has exhibited. The game would save on exit and had just the one save slot. There was one AA option and your resolution setting, nothing else to tweak image quality. There was a v-sync toggle as well but the game had a 60 FPS lock so it was redundant. The performance was overall decent but there drops to as low as 41 FPS at times which given the image quality shouldn’t have happened. Off-Peak also had this issue.

Game Engine: Unity
Save System: On Exit
Game Version Played: 1.3
Disk Space Used: 1.9 GB

Settings Used: 1080P, AA on
GPU Usage: 0-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1909-2072 MB
CPU Usage: 34-50 %
RAM Usage: 3.7-4.0 GB
Frame Rate: 41-60 FPS  

    Overall despite the technical issues and the slow middle of the game I can say it was a decent experience overall. CosmoD has a way of telling stories that creeps from throwing you in the deep end where nothing makes sense to slowly revealing bits to you in a way that ties it all together enough to make sense but still have some mystery. I finished the game in 2 hours and 7 minutes. I paid $14.27 CAD for it. I think the price was fair for the content and a tad could have been shaved from the middle to speed things up.

My Score: 7/10

My System:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.2 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.0.2 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.11.14-1-MANJARO