I've been playing ETHER One, it's pretty cool. Basically they merged the atmospheric exploration of games like Dear Ester and Gone Home with some actual gameplay. The game actually allows you to "play" it similar to Gone Home, in that you can beat the game just by walking around and doing a few minor puzzle-solving, but to get the full experience there are 20 major puzzles that you can optionally solve. You know there's a puzzle in the area if you find a broken film projector. When you complete a puzzle, it repairs a projector and then you can watch a little clip that explains what's going on. There's also like a million documents you can read that mostly don't tell you squat, so you can really get into that Gone Home vibe.
The puzzles are point-and-click basically, with the only oddity being that you can only hold one item at a time. Also you can't drop items anywhere, you can only drop them in authorized item drop areas. Which leads to some wonky situations where you pick up an item because you just wanted to look at it, but then you can't put back down. This usually isn't a big deal because when you pick up another object, you swap it with the object you currently have, but in some spots the object you're holding is too small for the area you want to pick up an item at so you can't swap it out, and you have to either look around for a place to put it down or take it back to your house, which has a bunch of shelves where you can drop stuff, but why do I want all that crap in my house??
(Example: I need to take a stamp out of a stamp book, but I'm holding a 50lb anvil. The anvil won't fit in the stamp book. The game tells me to go fuck myself with my anvil and come back with empty hands if I want that stamp. Only it actually doesn't tell you that, it forces you to figure out on your own why your man won't pick up the stamp you obviously need. Hint: You picked up an anvil for some reason.)
The story is that you're working at some kind of memory repair facility, and that you're entering the mind of a dementia patient to help restore her decaying mind, and you have to hurry up and do a good job because the board is about to pull funding if you can't provide some results. Along the way you find these little memory crystals and destroy them, on the way to finding the main "artifact" and destroying it, which the doctor assures you is a good thing, but the game is dropping all kinds of hints that it probably isn't. There's obviously going to be a twist, I haven't decided yet if it's going to turn out that you're destroying someone's brain, or if it's going to turn out that someone else is repairing your brain, or if it's going to turn out that someone else is actually destroying your brain.
