A puzzle game about creating stained glass windows. Sounds simple enough, but expands wildly in complexity as you push further into the worlds.
When Islands of Insight shut down, I was incredibly disapointed and sad. The style of puzzles were so interesting to me, and I enjoyed my time exploring and solving puzzles, including reaching some pretty big milestones in progress, and while I did find a few other games to fill in the void left behind, nothing really quite scratched that itch. But that’s where Artisan of Glimmith comes in. Lunarch is very good at creating interesting and fun puzzles, but I feel they were held back by the format they bound themselves to in IOI.
This game does not have the baggage of being open world or online, though. The game is stunningly beautiful, but it’s very much tailored to the exact aesthetic they were attempting here. Just like their previous game, the puzzle flow bounces back and forth between a world map (with still a little exploration, but not nearly as much as before), and puzzle solving.
Unlike IOI, however, this time the puzzles are about the shapes of contiguous regions, rather than using two different colours to partition the workspace.
You’re an artisan creating stained glass windows. Your benefactor does not care about the colours included in each piece, only the shapes of each individual piece of glass. Ensure all pieces form an L tetromino, or have area 5, or that no two similar shapes are touching. Each puzzle has its own rules, and all the rules are interesting and explored, both alone and together with other rules. This is exactly the thing I missed from playing Islands of Insight and I’m so happy to have it back.
To progress in the game, you only need to solve a small subset of puzzles in each area, between around 40-50% of the puzzles, in order to complete that area’s window. Solving all the windows in a region will unlock the next region, providing you with more puzzles and rules to learn. Reaching ~80% of the puzzles in an area will grant you a silver gilding to that area’s window, and ~95% of the puzzles lifts that to gold. Of course part of the challenge in reaching that gold guilding is not just having to deal with the higher difficulty puzzles, but also finding them.
The camera is in a fixed position on the world map. You cannot rotate it, only zoom in and out, and pan around. The developers use this to hide some of the game’s trickier puzzles into little cubbies or through holes in the terrain, so you’ll have to pan the camera around and check around the edges and corners of the screen to spot them. Unsolved puzzles have a small beacon above them to help in finding them, but spotting the beacon from one angle doesn’t necessarily imply you can click the puzzle from that angle, so you might have to look around more for a different viewing angle. This fixed perspective also helps with the game’s beauty, as the developers were presumably able to focus on just what the player sees and making it look as stunning as possible.
The game also has a puzzle creator and workshop support for more puzzles if you so wish.
In terms of hints, the game has a “check progress” button that tells you if things are correct or wrong based on which squares you’ve either connected with glass, or seperated by frame.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4160210 £10.99 (Demo Available)
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