Unfortunately, I can't say I'm the biggest fan of Parallax. I found the whole experience quite monotonous for a variety of reasons. The presentation didn't do much to wow me, as the art style is all black and white and the soundtrack only has a few tracks on loop, being from a small indie studio. The gameplay is pretty standard and even more so simplified of a Portal-like; you just walk around the environment with some minimal platforming and pressing switches. There's also this strange feeling of disconnect because you'll often hit switches that activate things from across the map or in the parallel dimension, and it's really hard to keep track of what you've done and what's happening due to both the parallel dimensions and having everything in the map look really similar to one another, not to mention that there is a ton of backtracking as you keep pressing switches. As a result, I found myself constantly getting lost and confused, even in some of the smaller and more condensed maps, and the pretty slow gameplay combined with the hypnotizing visuals made me really drowsy as I trudged through the levels. It also didn't help that there was often a really strange sense of vertigo in the last chapter when walking up and down the gravity defying curves, and despite the whole experience maybe taking at most two and a half hours, I was more than ready for this to be over about an hour in. It's a perfectly serviceable first person puzzle game, but I find that Parallax's peers just have so much more to offer and see.

Reviewed on Aug 27, 2022


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