ATONE: Heart of the Elder Tree

This game caught my eye for its unique art style and setting, so I gave it a try.

This game is Incredible, the Norse setting is just so cool. This is pretty much a rhythm based, explore the world/lore type of game. It works.

If you are not a fan of rhythm games, you can turn it off and take in the story instead (which is great)

I would LOVE to recommend this game at full price BUT unless its in one of its many game bundles for cheaper, you are paying £12 for a 4-5 hour story which you can complete in one sitting.

Other than that, I cannot think of a flaw for this game. Characters are fleshed out and interesting, story is great, hidden exploration secrets/references are funny and the game looks great for what it is.

Pick it up in a bundle for cheaper, it's a great experience.

Glad I stumbled upon this unique indie game and underrated gem. The hand drawn art style, emotional story, and relaxing exploration mixed with rhythm-based combat create a really unique experience. The soundtrack is great and the rhythm battle music is amazing.

The arena battle achievements are extremely difficult and I had to get my wife's help to complete them :D

Beautifully stylized with a genuinely interesting branching story, mainly driven by the characters. The rhythm-combat sections are fun, but relatively easy if you've played other rhythm games.
Running around/traversal doesn't 'feel' great, but the environment is atmospheric, so there's always something to look at.

WEAKLY recommended - it offers an extremely tame and stale telling of an extremely watered down Norse mythos original story that some casual players might enjoy.
In short, if your life mission is not to play through every casual game out there, you are best of just watching a cutscene compilation on YouTube. The maze levels and the level design in general is a big enough incentive.
UPDATE: Having seen most of the game and the ending extra scenes, it is not worth any investment. There is no character development during the gameplay and all relevant events happen either in the intro sequence (that will be repeatedly flashbacked) or during the final confrontation. Everything you do during the gameplay is highly inconsequential.
The script is quite awful. Your character motivations are unclear even to the character itself. The extra ending sequence is just a rehash of the what you have already seen and provides no new information. That exemplifies how much this game is about wasting your time, the slow movement speed aside.
Most of the "content" is the player walking around, completely unchallenged. Due to the pixel art graphics style, there really is not much aesthetic graphics to look at, making it not work as a 2D walking sim. That also means most of the gameplay time is largely unsatisfying.
The control designs reek of console port. Case to point, check out these default rhythm game inputs on the keyboard: 1, 2, 0 and 9 - basically the number keys on the number row because 0 and 9 would be pretty far apart if played with the num pad. I wonder how little playtesting it would have taken to pick any other controls. They could have gone with the Unity standard of Z, X, C and V and it would have been better. This game probably allows rebinding, though I do not consider sucking-out-of-the-box to be something to keep and value.
It is a rhythm puzzle game. It has secrets that you are likely to miss unless you use a walkthrough. Yeah it lacks some serious design polish to the point it is barely getting a passing grade.
If you are looking for a bang for your buck, you should pick any other game. The game tries to tell an epic emotional revenge story of sorts, though it uses such comical fantasy trophes that it is impossible to take seriously.
A couple examples: 1. player's father gets done in by a dark specter (Skeletor much).
2. You fight a skeleton (Skeletor) that insist on fighting and offers no reason for it.
Not to mention all of the anime references ("Black Swordsman" AKA Guts from Berserk in the intro village and "Kamina" from Gurren Lagann on a gravestone).
When Ubisoft's Valhalla offers a more serious take, your narrative needs help.
The reason for why I emphasize the narrrative is because most of the game content is contained in its form. If removed, all there would be left is bare-bones puzzle and rhythm game segments not unlike what you can see in some one-dollar indie games. This one is priced close to the 20-dollar, grade A indie game level. Games like that should have some serious replay value. This one doesn't.
I do not want to talk about the rhythm game. It is enough for me to mention that it can skip frames at times and possibly deny you the vision of the right timing.
The puzzles are something a second grade school kid could beat. If they dragged on, I would consider the game to be worse due to there being no believable world-building integration of those puzzles.
I have not beat the game yet, though the general boredom, a general lack of hope about things improving and apathy have already set in. I expect myself to like the game even less once I have trudged trough it. It embodies a lot of the "nontent" styles modern indies like to utilize. I would take a game with much worse assets and no voice acting over this one if it was simple and fun to play and not just endlessly wandering from point A to point B, hoping for something interesting to happen for the first time.
I got this game as a Fanatical Mystery Game, mostly because of lemmings upvoting it like crazy. It is telling that practically everyone in those reviews is saying it is good and none of them are mentioning any specifics or why it is "good" and whatever they mean with it. It seems like a bunch of mass sunken-cost cope to me. A game held together by vapid praise is likely to have a dead community and no sales just a couple of years after the release. I have looked through enough SteamDB and Gamalytic stats of various games to confirm the pattern.

So even though I wanted this game purely because I knew it had banging music and just seeing the art style intrigued me (indie games will always rock more style than AAA, quote me on that), somehow I completely missed the fact that thiiiiiiis is a rhythm game!

And honestly, after I got over that surprise, I realize what a perfect fit that made for things like battle! Let's be honest: us gamers always need fantastic music to battle to and usually get into the beat of it when it's really good. This just merges the two wonderfully!

And I think it's also pretty good for people who aren't wholly used to rhythm game battling just yet, thanks to its difficulty system. If you're new to it, then you can just do the "two lines only" version, where you only have to worry about two buttons in the rhythm battling. But more experienced players can go for even more buttons to match to the beat! I honestly really like that. It's simple, but it works great.

Additionally, there are multiple paths to take, and sometimes trying to find everything on a first run can be really tricky. I didn't realize I'd messed up with a certain snake until it was far too late for me to turn back... but the game cheerfully shows you a roadmap at the end of your playthrough showing what you've done and what you missed!

That leads to more than enough replay value, especially if you start out cautiously at a lower difficulty and then ramp it up for yourself. The wonderful thing about the game as well is that it's relatively short, so it won't feel like it wholly takes over your entire life as you replay to get those endings. Sometimes a short game is all you need.

Anyway, definitely very fun and wonderfully made.

A beautiful and interesting game, but a bit lacking in terms of gameplay. Especially during the first hours, it's just long dialogues and cutscenes, then 2 minutes of gameplay with puzzles so easy they can barely be called puzzles, then more dialogues and cutscenes. Thankfully it gets better later on, and the story is engaging, but the puzzles remain way too easy all the way through. The only exceptions are optional puzzles, which on the contrary are way too difficult. In fact they're more like riddles, or challenges you would find in an IQ test or something. They're purposefully vague, and I'm sometimes certain I have the correct solution yet fail.

The best parts of the game are the rhythm sections which serve as fights, although they're a bit short and there aren't many of them. It's a shame we can't watch the beautiful animations in the background while playing, but that's a flaw inherent the the genre so I can't hold it against the game.

If you don't bother too much with the nonsensical optional puzzles, it's actually pleasant to follow the story through that little mythological universe. Graphics, writing, animation, everything is well crafted.

This was really interesting!

Essentially, Atone is an adventure(-ish?) game with two key unique features/styles.
First, there is a branching storyline that, while still gets you to mostly the same point, does have different flowing-on consequences based on about half-a-dozen-or-so key decisions you make. When you finish the game it shows you the overall flowchart and the path you took, so you can get an overall sense of how it all did/can fit together.
What I especially like about this is that the game isn't super long; you can finish it comfortably in one extended session, or a couple of short ones. This means that you can easily come back and replay the game to explore the alternative choices you can make, without having to commit to hours upon hours of gameplay.

The second unique feature is the combat, which is basically a rhythm game... and there is no explanation as to why. It doesn't seem to fit at all, and while there's nothing wrong with it, it's just a bit odd.
As far as I can gather, I believe the reason for it is two-fold: firstly to make the story-based combat "easily successful", so as to focus on the story itself (you can actually turn it off entirely for the main game, if you want); and to provide an end-game, skills-based experience to keep playing the game. As I said, there's nothing wrong with it, and it's still pretty fun.

There are also a good amount of puzzles, which are a good level of not too hard but also not too easy, so you feel like you can find and get through them all without having to look for outside help.

Given that Atone is usually going for pretty cheap, I would recommend grabbing it and giving it a go. It's pretty good, especially for the price.