AnShi

I came into AnShi expecting a short atmospheric detour and left with genuinely mixed feelings, which is honestly more than I expected from a title built by a single developer. The setup is wordless and efficient: your alien crashes on a desolate planet, grabs a hoverboard, and starts piecing together what happened to this dead world by collecting memory fragments across caves, desert flats, and crumbling temple ruins. There are no combat systems, no branching skill trees, nothing that would interest someone coming from a systems-heavy background. What AnShi offers instead is closer to an interactive film than a game, and it is best evaluated on those terms. The hoverboard is the one mechanical hook that actually works. Carving across open desert zones has a genuine sense of speed and flow, and the sensitivity options let you dial in the handling to something that feels comfortable. The problems start when the camera gets involved. Rocky terrain causes the camera to judder and snap back aggressively on collisions, which undercuts the momentum the hoverboard builds up. The core loop in each zone is straightforward: collect three memory fragments, encounter the alien elders via a symbol-decoding sequence that resolves itself automatically, then follow glowing orbs and sky beams to the next area. The environmental puzzles flirt with complexity but tend to self-solve, and collectibles like artifacts and seed flowers exist for achievement hunters, though finding all twelve artifacts without a guide is a quiet test of patience since community resources for this title are thin. The companion, an orb of light that joins you early on, is a concept that never fully earns its place mechanically. It provides light in a couple of darker sections and briefly becomes the playable character to squeeze through tight checkpoint spaces. Both ideas feel undercooked rather than purposeful. The animations on the alien protagonist also carry the fingerprints of raw motion-capture footage with minimal post-processing, which is noticeable but forgivable given the one-developer context. What is harder to forgive is the invisible wall problem. The world looks open, the hoverboard tempts you to explore, and then hard edges repeatedly pull you back onto a linear corridor. The gap between the suggested freedom and the delivered freedom is the game's biggest design failure. The soundtrack by Devel Sullivan is the reason most people finish AnShi rather than refund it. It carries an Arabian-influenced, orchestral quality with bells and layered instruments that swell during story moments and pull back during open exploration in a way that feels genuinely intelligent. Muting the game for even a few minutes exposes how much structural weight the audio is carrying. Without it, the pacing would collapse. With it, there are stretches, particularly in the desert biome, where the whole thing clicks into something close to the Journey-adjacent experience it is clearly aiming for. AnShi draws that comparison constantly and it is a hard one to avoid, but treating it as a lesser Journey misses the point: this is a solo passion project with a fraction of the budget, and judged against its own stated goal of a relaxing, movie-length sci-fi ride, it mostly delivers. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified.

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