So this game has not been released yet, but I am so incredibly hype for it! It’s the brainchild of some of the industry’s best puzzle creators, and the closest comparison I can make is to The Witness, but it’s so much more than just that! You can jump in this one.
Explore a stunningly beautiful world and complete a dozen different kinds of puzzles of different types.
By the time you read this post, the public test period is already over, which is unfortunate, but I only just barely caught it on the tail end of the window too, so I only got a couple days with it.
As you explore the island, you’ll find 4 different kinds of puzzles around the world:
- Logic puzzles: Cubes scattered around that have puzzle grids inside with various rules for variety, as well as other similar puzzles such as match 3 puzzles.
- Perspective puzzles: Pairs of cubes that you have to find a location where you can see both, a platform of pillars where you have to find a line of sight to all of them at once, and bundles of concentric rings that you have to find a clear line inside all of them.
- Movement challenges: Sets of rings to fly through without touching the ground, echoes to chase around, mazes to navigate.
- Hidden Object trials: Cubes, archways, and rings hidden throughout the world that are naught more than faint outlines and audio cues, as well as pillars asking you to find 5 blue lights within a radius of them.
And there are a whole bunch of other puzzles not described above, as well as more that are hinted at without actually being implemented yet, like lockpicking puzzles and sound memory puzzles.
I mentioned that the game is open world, but that’s not the whole story, it’s also an MMO. There are other players running around in the same world as you, though from my experience, you tend to not run into too many people during play. The only method of communication in the demo was through a small selection of pings (look, this way, not here, etc) and emotes (wave, shrug, etc). There seems to be the skeleton of a party system and a “request help” system for logic grids, but those weren’t implemented in the demo, which is unfortunate as the first thing I tried was to party up with my partner who is also big into puzzles like I am.
There were also a lot of beautiful landscapes outside the boundary of the play area, a roman area to the north, remeniscent of The Talos Principle, an island of pagodas to the south, it already takes minutes to navigate edge to edge of the play area, and the ingame map describes that play area as less than 1/5 of the full game world, and that’s only if they don’t extend it whilst developing more. I’m excited for all of it.
As I explained at the top though, this is a super early temporary public test build, so things will be changing as the game is developed more, hopefully for the better, as this game is already super promising.
I’ll almost certainly be posting another friday post when the game actually releases!
Wishlist now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2071500
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