Membrane

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1, 1-2 Competitive Unlockable Minigames (Local)

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Review:

Membrane is a physics-based puzzle-platformer where you play an anthropomorphized thought traveling through the human body from the brain to the hand. This… doesn’t really make sense, but whatever. You play a little guy trying to get past obstacles by using an ability to fire out little sticky blocks that are affected by physics.

The concept is really cool, and in theory allows for a lot of freedom – you can shoot out these blocks to build bridges, or a ladder, and the puzzles are fairly open-ended to allow players to come up with whatever solutions they like. However, in practice, it doesn’t really work out that way.

The thing is, since you can only fire from where your character is, and the blocks are still greatly affected by gravity, your options are not nearly as endless as you might like. You can try to shoot a bridge to a place you want to get to, but the blocks forming that would-be bridge will immediately start bending even as you continue firing more, ending up making a sloppy mess.

Often, you’ll be able to Jerry-rig something that will get the job done, but it’s never clean or elegant, and it pretty much always feels like in trying to do something clever to solve a puzzle, you invariably end up inadvertently doing something stupid instead that still manages to get the job done, and it’s hard to feel like it’s your victory when this sort of thing happens, and it pretty much always happens.

This same sort of messy design extends to the game’s presentation, which is both attractive and repulsive all at once, with ugly, poorly-drawn characters and a bright, eye-popping color palette, along with a soundtrack that seems random and confused, yet still manages to be a bit catchy regardless.

In the end, Membrane is a game with some very good ideas that feel like they could have spent more time to coalesce into something that used them better. It’s not terrible, but you’ll find yourself wishing that the clever ideas here were put to use in a better game.

tl;dr – Membrane is a physics-based Puzzle-Platformer where your character shoots streams of sticky blocks to get past obstacles. Unfortunately, the great ideas this game has are marred by a shoddy execution.

Grade: C+

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