I enjoyed this. It's a 2D puzzle-platformer by Czech studio Amanita Design, the same team who made Machinarium and Botanicula.
You play as a nameless, voiceless protagonist who one day discovers a passage to an underground world which he falls into and then has to escape from. In practice it reminded me of games like Braid and The Swapper: you make your way through over 50 discrete puzzle screens by ascending and descending ladders, pulling levers, standing on pressure plates and manipulating enemy behaviours to get to the exit without using combat. The gimmick this time around is that light turns monsters into innocuous items of household furniture, so you end up throwing switches at the right moment to turn cuboid dogs into chests of drawers, or scary mimic men into pointy coat stands, and then shift them around to find a way forwards. The puzzles are satisfying without ever being too obscure; I managed to complete the game without using a guide, and I wasn't stuck on any one room for more than ten minutes. In fact, to begin with I thought things were a bit too simplistic, with one puzzle room feeling too much like the last. From about halfway onwards, however, additional mechanics are added to make each scene feel a bit more substantial, and by the final act you're clearing rooms which, to begin with, seemed impossibly convoluted.
The best thing about the game, however, is the way it looks: every single room is brilliantly drawn in an over-detailed, claustrophobic style that reminded me of Marcus Sendak's art for Where The Wild Things Are, or Olivia Kemp's hyper-meticulous pen and ink drawings. The structure itself that you're exploring - an impossible, crumbling, teetering, higgledy-piggledy castle, like a surrealist Gormenghast - is fantastic, and the best reward the game doles out for completing one screen is the treat of seeing the next. The sometimes ominous, sometimes jazzy soundtrack adds to the atmosphere, too, building slowly in time with your thoughts as you figure out each puzzle.
If you like games of this type, or if you appreciate Amanita's earlier stuff, then I would definitely check this out. It doesn't quite have Machinarium's freshness, nor the brain-shifting depth of something like Braid, but it's four hours or so well spent over a weekend, and nearly every room will have you reaching for the Switch's screenshot button. It looks especially lovely on dat OLED screen, too.
8/10
You play as a nameless, voiceless protagonist who one day discovers a passage to an underground world which he falls into and then has to escape from. In practice it reminded me of games like Braid and The Swapper: you make your way through over 50 discrete puzzle screens by ascending and descending ladders, pulling levers, standing on pressure plates and manipulating enemy behaviours to get to the exit without using combat. The gimmick this time around is that light turns monsters into innocuous items of household furniture, so you end up throwing switches at the right moment to turn cuboid dogs into chests of drawers, or scary mimic men into pointy coat stands, and then shift them around to find a way forwards. The puzzles are satisfying without ever being too obscure; I managed to complete the game without using a guide, and I wasn't stuck on any one room for more than ten minutes. In fact, to begin with I thought things were a bit too simplistic, with one puzzle room feeling too much like the last. From about halfway onwards, however, additional mechanics are added to make each scene feel a bit more substantial, and by the final act you're clearing rooms which, to begin with, seemed impossibly convoluted.
The best thing about the game, however, is the way it looks: every single room is brilliantly drawn in an over-detailed, claustrophobic style that reminded me of Marcus Sendak's art for Where The Wild Things Are, or Olivia Kemp's hyper-meticulous pen and ink drawings. The structure itself that you're exploring - an impossible, crumbling, teetering, higgledy-piggledy castle, like a surrealist Gormenghast - is fantastic, and the best reward the game doles out for completing one screen is the treat of seeing the next. The sometimes ominous, sometimes jazzy soundtrack adds to the atmosphere, too, building slowly in time with your thoughts as you figure out each puzzle.
If you like games of this type, or if you appreciate Amanita's earlier stuff, then I would definitely check this out. It doesn't quite have Machinarium's freshness, nor the brain-shifting depth of something like Braid, but it's four hours or so well spent over a weekend, and nearly every room will have you reaching for the Switch's screenshot button. It looks especially lovely on dat OLED screen, too.
8/10