Review | Threefold Recital 'A Lot To Digest' (PC)

Threefold Recital is an oriental fantasy puzzle platformer set in the fictional world of Bluescales. Think magic, Buddhism, steampunk, and a sprinkle of human-and-beastling drama. If you crossed Mario with Ace Attorney and threw in a healthy dose of lore, you’d get something like this.

Now, I’m not usually a platformer fan, but the game’s theme and puzzle mechanics intrigued me enough to give it a go. While it’s not currently supported on Steam Deck, I had no issues playing the game on it and could pick the controller layout for playing along with the touch screen.

Ultimately, the game didn’t bring me to enlightenment. Instead, it dropped me into a dense web of text and lore that left me feeling… Lore-whelmed.

A wolf, fox, and snake walk into a bar…

The prologue eases you into the mechanics. It’s a classic platformer, except you’re juggling three characters with unique abilities:

Triratna, the wolf-monk: can see and sever karma lines — the threads of cause and effect tying everything together;
Taiqing, the fox-priest: transmutes substances and other Daoist spells;
Transia, the snake-artist: can enter paintings and take on other people’s appearances.

You’re given some history of how the three main characters came to be. The trio are Beastlings, animals who gained human forms through effort, patience, and wisdom.

Puzzles Aplenty

As a puzzle platformer, Threefold Recital delivers on brain teasers. Getting to those puzzles, however? That’s its own test. The game’s a lot of reading—more reading than playing at times. I’m all for a good book, but when the gameplay takes a backseat to dialogue, my patience wears thin.

Once you get past the walls of text, the puzzles are clever and rewarding, although sometimes tedious. Triratna’s karma-cutting evolves from trivial to tricky. While it starts out quite straightforward and even a bit boring in the first episode, Triratna’s ability becomes the most engaging. It requires the most skill out of the three characters (although admittedly, not that much skill compared to other games).

Taiqing’s abilities add a visual flourish, even if it’s simpler in execution. He crafts stuff and hops between dimensions, but let’s be honest: the crafting is just glorified fetch-questing. The dimension-hopping is where the fun’s at — it’s like a cosmic field trip. However, they both just require the press of a button… So nothing revolutionary.

Transia’s abilities were the simplest, but she had an interesting storyline which drew me in more than Triratna’s episode. Her powers allow her to travel through artwork to get to different areas and also disguise herself as other characters by ‘Bodypainting’. Again, this doesn’t require any skill on the player’s part, but hey – at least I was engaged by the story. I had to disguise myself as several different characters in the penultimate episode in order to get to different areas and interrogate others for information.

Each of the three main characters gets their own episode, so you’ll need a dash of memory and deduction to piece the story together. But don’t worry – it’s more “mild brain teaser” than “genius-level IQ test.”

Lore Overload

Credit where it’s due: the devs built a rich and immersive world in Threefold Recital. The balance of mechanics, character interplay, and dialogue keeps the story engaging—most of the time. The first episode dragged a bit, but by the second, I found myself more invested.

I also enjoyed the home base area. After each episode, you can spend Karmarines (gems) on a gachapon machine to unlock items. It’s a fun, game-within-a-game mechanic that gave me Astro Bot vibes.

Backtracking Blues

Unfortunately, the game stumbles in the penultimate episode. The amount of backtracking felt like running in circles. And the final episode? It rehashed the entire prologue. At first, I thought it was a bug — nope, just intentional repetition. By that point, it felt like padding, not progression.

Another gripe: the dialogue-heavy sequences can’t always be paused. Long conversations without a save feature meant I was occasionally stuck without a break, which is a missed quality-of-life opportunity.

Some sections weren’t translated from the original Chinese, but this didn’t hinder gameplay. On the plus side, the credits included epilogues for all the characters, which was sweet — but making players actively participate after so much dialogue felt unnecessary. A skip option here would’ve been appreciated.

Once the game is complete, you can go back to play the other episodes to complete them, and skip through parts of the story you’re familiar with (hallelujah).

Final Thoughts

Threefold Recital’s world is a feast for the senses — and the brain. But between the lore dumps, repetitive sections, and unskippable dialogue, it left me more fatigued than enlightened. Still, if you’re into lore-rich games and puzzles, it’s worth a try.

Threefold Recital is now available on PC via Steam. There’s a demo if you wanted to check it out before you buy.

Quest Daily scores Threefold Recital:

6/10

A copy of Threefold Recital was supplied to Quest Daily for this review.