Psikodelya has got to be one of the lazier excuses for an "exploration game" I've seen recently. Gameplay consists of slowly trudging around a handful of bland levels picking up random garbage, interspersed with some insultingly simple box-pushing puzzles and extremely basic platforming.
The levels themselves mainly take the form of utterly generic forests (or some other "natural" environment) with a handful of houses scattered around. The pool of 3D-models the game draws from is painfully small, and seems to have mostly come from the Unity asset store, a practice common in smaller-scale indie games, that, while somewhat controversial, doesn't inherently worsen a game. You should at least try to bring some visual variety to the table, not like Psikodelya, which will have you enter a room in a random house only to be greeted with three identical copies of the same table with stacks of books scattered around you've seen in every room since the start of the game, except that now the screen's been overlaid with a slightly different garish, eye-gouging filter.
For a game that loves nothing more than half-baked references to drug culture, constantly dropping pretentious, largely meaningless quotes from just about every rando who ever publicly advocated for smoking the devil's lettuce and letting players collect LSD blotters as an optional objective, there's surprisingly little in it that could reasonably be called psikodelyc. Even the soundtrack is an abject failure, mainly consisting of short, permanently looping tracks of generic electronic music with the general air of the kind of royalty-free stock music frequently found in YouTube intros. Music can be one of the most effective ways of building atmosphere, but then again, I doubt it would've helped much in this case.
So, in short, Psikodelya is a game with almost no redeeming factors, just genuinely bad in practically every single area. Walking sims have a bad reputation, and it's easy to see why when playing zero-effort garbage like this. Avoid like the plague.
Final rating: 3.2/10
originally written on 23/05/2023
