Puzzlement

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Puzzlement is a Puzzle-Platformer that plays with perspective and dimension, as you move a character in two dimensions on three-dimensional objects, resulting in the directions “up” and “down” correspond to changing depending on what direction you approach them from. Using your knowledge of this, you are tasked with collecting all of the red dots that appear throughout each level.

It’s an interesting and largely unique direction to approach the genre, but a few issues keep it from being fun. Firstly, the game forces you to use only the right side of a Pro controller to move, or conversely the right Joycon, for reasons that I simple cannot understand. It’s awkward and completely unnecessary. Also, your character (which looks like a red Pac-Man ghost) moves extremely slowly, and the platforming here is stiff and limited. Since just moving around in this game feels like a drag, it’s even more frustrating that this game’s puzzles are designed in a way that messing up means that you have to restart the whole thing. You know, a “rewind” feature would have been really nice here.

As for the presentation, It’s clean, basic… boring. It works well enough for the game, especially since the last thing you want when dealing with mind-bending puzzles is distracting visuals, but added to the slow nature of the gameplay, it really adds up to an overwhelming blandness that permeates the game. This pairs with calm, soothing music, which I’m not sure was the best route to go here, since the gameplay already has me wanting to fall asleep.

Puzzlement has some good ideas for a Puzzle game, but the way those ideas are packaged here just makes them too difficult to enjoy, with the slow, plodding platforming and tedious elements of the game design resulting in a game that just feels boring.

tl;dr – Puzzlement is a Puzzle-Platformer that has you moving a two-dimensional character through 3D space, and trying to collect all of the red dots in a level. It’s an interesting idea, but this idea is ruined by stiff, slow-paced platforming and terrible control issues that makes the game dreadfully tedious.

Grade: C-

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