But my pick for the best is the most recent. Through its intricate 3D puzzles connected together with spooky, compellingly told stories, The Room has quickly become one of the most successful puzzling series of the last ten years.Īll the Room games are well made, including the excellent standalone VR experience. The Room series is largely responsible for bringing hidden-object puzzling back from the brink of obscurity. It’s also a poor teacher, and if you don’t grok its obscure symbology, you’ll probably be playing it until the day you die. That said, it is undoubtedly one of the most pretentious games ever made, with a story told through audio-logs that are the height of pseudo-intellectual codswallop. It’s hard to deny the quality of the The Witness’ open-ended puzzling. It’s this that forms the backbone of the game’s mystery, and your comprehension of that language will direct your journey across the island. Yet despite this abundance of mazes, the crux of the Witness’ puzzling is less about finding the right pathways, but deciphering the symbolic language that instructs you on how to solve different mazes. There even mazes built into the environment itself, revealed only when you stand in a certain position and click on a certain object. From classically styled “get to the exit” mazes, there are mazes where you draw two parallel lines, mazes where you draw two inverted lines, mazes where you need to draw a certain shape, mazes where you must follow or avoid a particular path. It’s truly astonishing what The Witness squeezes out of the common or garden maze. Placing you on a beautiful and mysterious island, the Witness attempts to do for mazes what Doom did for shotguns. Also, while undoubtedly a clever game, it’s never smug with it, letting its brilliant concept do all the talking. By spinning the level around, previously inaccessible platforms will suddenly line-up for you to jump across, while climbable creepers will connect to provide a pathway to the next stage of the level.įez combines these elements with some fantastic pixel-art, a delightful soundtrack, and a really fun and upbeat vibe. It’s an incredible gimmick which the game uses to produce some beautifully brain-teasing platforming enigmas. Initially presenting itself as a straightforward, retro-styled 2D platformer, Fez’s levels are actually fully three-dimensional, with players able to flip between any of a level’s four planes. Like Superliminal, Fez is also about shifting perspectives, but its take on the concept couldn’t be more different. Yet it’s a smart and highly innovative puzzling adventure nonetheless. In structure and humour, Superliminal leans a little too heavily on Valve’s Portal for support, right down to having an amoral AI computer as one of its main characters. Even the game’s story is a surprisingly touching little tale about finding new angles on personal problems. It’s an incredible effect, and only one of Superliminal’s brilliant perspective-shifting tricks. To you, the can of soda or wedge of cheese you’ve picked up always looks the same size, but depending on how you move around relative to other objects in the room, when you put it down it’ll be as small as a pea or as big as a house. Superliminal has one of the coolest puzzling mechanics I’ve encounter since Portal, wherein you change the size of objects by picking them up and then moving around the room you’re in. I wanted to focus specifically on more recent puzzle games, rather than trot out the familiar classics like Myth and Portal, as it’s been a fantastic few years for inventive, ingenious puzzlers, while a few of these games deserve far more attention than they’ve received. So it’s time for me to provide that recognition in handy, easily digestible list format. It’s a heck of a task, and one that really doesn’t get enough recognition. Oh, and you’ve got to come up with your whole puzzling concept in the first place. Now imagine designing 10 hours’ worth of said puzzles, in code, with enough variety to stop the player from becoming bored. Ever tried drawing a maze or creating your own crossword for someone else to solve? It’s difficult enough to make one that works, let alone make one that’s precisely balanced to be challenging without being obstructive. This is doubly unfortunate considering a good puzzler is also one of the hardest types of games to make. Puzzle games don’t always get the credit they deserve, often neglected in the all-time great rankings in favour of bloated open world games about sad mass-murdering dads.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |