Let's start with a bit of honesty: Delete After Reading is not the kind of game I would normally play, if I knew in advance what it would be like.
Not because it's bad or there's something wrong with it, on the contrary, but in itself it's not the kind of game that usually falls into the category of things I look for.

The only thing in common between it and "what I'm looking for" is the presence of puzzles, however not all games with puzzles inside them are automatically of interest to me.

The Steam Next Fest demo was the trigger (again... ), which made me curious about the very particular format, evidently conceived for a vertical/phone format, with the wording "book to play, or game to read?"

Thank so much PATRONES & ESCONDITES for the opportunity!

Delete After Reading is a text-based video game and tells us an absurd and incredible adventure along the lines of the brilliant events of children's movies: a little serious, a little funny, with a story that is at times truly surreal and incredible but tremendously adventurous .

The game's protagonist finds a strange contraption in his backpack, with a message that says "Read before you delete", from someone who "wants to team up with ləi" (yes, it's a schwa) for what seems like the greatest adventure of all time: to recover the fourth installment of an extremely popular video game series - The Curse of Penguin Island.

The video game exists in a single copy but the billionaire Martin Skrilhex appropriated it with the aim of being the only one in the world who could play it. An injustice concocted by cruel Destiny.
Nina, Cinco and Tomate have therefore organized a secret mission to recover the video game and give it back to humanity to finally allow everyone to play it.

But they need a fourth participant and that fourth is us!
However, that's not all, because this group is anything but ordinary:
Nina Nina is a ghost child who knows how to exploit her nature in incredible ways.
Cinco (lit. transl. "Five") is a goblin rapper.
Tomate (lit. transl. "Tomato") is a rabbit convinced that he is the reincarnation of a specific Blues Brother and is crazy about blues music.

Similar to other small video games that aim for playability on multiple platforms, Delete After Reading was born mainly as an interactive story to be played on mobile and tablets, hence the vertical scrolling and 2D graphics.

The style is very reminiscent of a cartoon, simple and modern, childish but in the good sense of the word, which allows you to focus on the mechanics. In fact, the point of the game is not the world in which the adventure or exploration takes place, but reading and solving the puzzles.

Despite the essentiality of the artistic part, I really liked the characterization of the characters: the protagonist is the player, so they doesn't have a real appearance and we never see them, not even reflected in a mirror. All we know is that they’re still in school. On the other hand, the absurd members of the absurd gang are all well defined.

It is true that from a certain point of view they are a bit "exaggerated" as a concept, but since the game is humorous and semi-serious, in my opinion they are fine.

I have only two remarks on this: the background pattern in certain parts and the impact on motion sickness sufferers.

As for the background, some sections of the game have emerald/turquoise colored text on a black background with dark teal stripes and there are two problems here:

• the dark color of the lines, their thickness and the black of the background put a lot of strain on my eyesight, especially when my eyes remain there for more than a few moments.
• the color of the lettering and the text placed directly above the striped background made it really hard for me to read for more than a few moments. At some point the lines and words started to merge like an optical illusion and every time I had to stop for a few minutes to wait for all the flashes in my field of vision to disappear and try again to read the text.

Speaking of motion sickness instead, I admit that unfortunately I suffered a lot from it. I have a doubt that it was due to my playing it on a desktop PC instead of on a mobile, completely unbalancing everything: the PC screen is huge compared to that of the phone and occupies much more of the visual field, all the elements are much larger and consequently also the continuous scrolling up and down to look for clues and solve puzzles becomes MUCH greater and intense.

This without considering the huge empty space on the sides of the central area where the contents are located.

The problem isn't dramatic and I couldn't even say how much is due to me in particular and to my level of personal sensitivity to these things, but even if it were I'm certainly not the only one, so if you think you're similar to me and/ or suffer from motion sickness, be careful!

My advice: if you suffer from motion sickness, play it on your phoneas it was created to be.

Game tested ONLY in the PC version on Steam.

Delete After Reading is a potpourri of different mechanics, almost all of which are part of the universe of puzzles, with a hint of point-and-click and timed escape-room mechanics in some scenes.
The chapters are quite different from each other, both in terms of mechanics and in terms of rhythm, really limiting the feeling of repetitiveness and thus avoiding potential boredom.

The first thing to say is that READING is an essential and unavoidable mechanic of this game, valid for ALL chapters: if you don't like visual novels this game probably isn't the most suitable for you, but if you DON'T like reading in general then this game really is your cruelest nemesis.
After all, part of the game's marketing specifically referred to this concept: a game to read or a book to play? (trad: "un gioco da leggere o un libro da giocare?").

That said, the main mechanics of the game (aside from reading!) are:

Colored words and letters: it's the very first mechanic we're presented with, literally in the first sentence of text we're offered.

All we have to do is read and click on it.
At this point several things can happen: in the majority of cases, other text is triggered which can replace or add to the one already present but a small animated scene/cutscene can also be triggered. Other times they directly hide puzzles or solutions to these.

Pictures: pictures are the other side of the sky in this game. Anything that isn't text is almost always an image (animated or not), and anything that isn't an image is almost always text.

In the images, as in the text, you will find many different things: well-hidden clues, the solutions you need, passwords, tools, other text (!), illustrations of the environment you are in or of its details (such as shelves, shelves, photos, parts of the furniture in general).
In cases where you can interact directly with the image or animation, it will be to open boxes or crates, press switches, enter combinations, interact with computers and other devices, and so on

Puzzles: the complex points of the game and the core of the adventure. They are hidden between words or in images, the clues to solve them can also be found in previous paragraphs or in voice messages from the characters. They can also consist of word games, quizzes, visual puzzles that play on colors and meanings.

Most of the time the soundtrack is very simple and mainly serves to underline the atmosphere and mood of the situation in which the protagonists find themselves.

Since the gameplay of the game is reading paragraphs of text and solving puzzles, there is very little action and no visual references (as opposed to any other 2D or 3D game) and the music in this case helps to tune automatically.

The tracks are pleasant and fun, in line with the type of video game and the target to which it is addressed, never annoying or too obvious.

~Minor spoilers to follow~
(meccaniche/gameplay)

However, I must make a special mention for "I'm Sitting on Top of the World(historical song from 1925).
This piece acts as a timer during the final part of the game, which is timed: in fact, there is nothing visual that allows us to quantify the time and we only have 2 minutes available.

We have to complete the task before the song ends.
The test consists of a sequence of puzzles that play a lot on text puzzles, it is not difficult in itself but requires an eye, timing and good reflexes.

The mathematical formula of failure.

The quicker you make mistakes, the more familiar the attack of the song will become.
~Too familiar~

The drama is that, at least in the PC / Steam version, making mistakes is quite easy.

In the long run, unfortunately, not only does it tend to distract, but it can also become quite annoying. Does it ruin the experience of everything else in the game?
Questo rovina l'esperienza di tutto il resto del gioco?
Absolutely not.

Is it an insurmountable problem?
No, I wouldn't say.

As mentioned, it can become very annoying if, by chance, you find yourself having difficulty passing all the tests due to the constant repetition of the song that you will be forced to endure.

In this case there is a very simple trick (that I also exploited very poorly): mute the music after a handful of attempts. It's a rather banal suggestion, I know, but it is often forgotten that it is possible to mute the music with the risk of simply continuing to suffer.

However don't worry: even if you turn off the volume to the music, you will still be able to understand how time passes (unless you want to set a separate timer, of course), given that the more you make mistakes, the more you become familiar with the solution of the single tests, which makes you more efficient and faster!

Delete After Reading is a really nice adventure, suitable for all ages (or almost, I recognize that some puzzles may not be exactly simple for the little ones) and with really interesting mechanics and ideas.

The story is fresh, original to the right point but unpretentious, which is deepened neither too much nor too little, connecting the events and all the puzzles that are proposed in a truly excellent way, without anything appearing too far-fetched or detached from the context.

However I can say that, in my opinion, it doesn't work the same way on PC as it does on mobile (whether phone or tablet).

At the time of writing this review I haven't played it on phone but I guess I don't even need to to know that the way the game is built it has to look really good on smaller displays.
The larger spaces on the sides of the main content column are dispersive, disorienting and, again in my opinion, make the game a little more cumbersome, as well as potentially triggering motion sickness in a devastating way.

However, this opinion of mine is not a criticism in any way: the game is nice and if you like the genre it's really worth playing (and on mobile it's free with in-app purchases!) but being designed for mobile, on PC it really loses a lot and it couldn't be otherwise given the difference between PCs and portable devices.

So if you want to play it, my most dispassionate advice is to do it on mobile. Buy the game on Steam if you don't suffer from motion sickness and/or if you want to support the development studio, which never hurts, considering that the game on Steam costs very few euros.

And finally, I summarize the few and light "criticisms" I have about the PC version:

• the sections with a black background with petroleum stripes and turquoise text that are very eye-testing
• the fact that there is no visual timer in the final exam in case someone needs one, which makes it very inaccessible for people who are hard of hearing/deaf.
• remaining in the field of accessibility problems, the lack of subtitles creates additional ones considering that the game is only available in English and Spanish. If you are not a native English speaker or your level of spoken English isn't high, understanding the voice messages without subtitles could be difficult. At times even quite difficult. Even more so if we are talking, as before, about people with hearing difficulties, who could play without too many problems but who are thus completely cut off by this small lack. Obviously they can go and look for the answer to their doubts on the web, but they shouldn't be forced to do so for this kind of reasons.

Hope devs will add them in the future!