Lanternium

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Lanternium is a family-friendly character-based Puzzle game where players control a racoon who has had his cookies stolen by a fox, and to get them back he must chase him across strange worlds where a magical color-changing lantern is needed to cross magical colored cubes. This game was released in 2019 on PC and Nintendo Switch before later being ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2020.

Graphically, Lanternium looks good, but simple. There’s not much to the worlds you’ll be moving through – they mostly consist of blocks suspended in the air over a backdrop, but the blocks, characters, and backdrop all look nice enough. This is paired with a plucky soundtrack and decent voice-over with soft tones and slow pacing that seems like it’s clearly intended for an audience of young children. It’s not bad, but this game is clearly aiming for a wide appeal.

As for the gameplay itself, this game has players trying to figure how to best manipulate the colors of their lantern to cross over blocks that require that color to be lit to cross them. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it works well enough, and the inclusion of things like color-mixing ensure that things remain interesting.

There are two more things to mention about this game, a good thing and a bad thing, and both have to do with the controls. On the good side of things, this game offers both traditional gamepad controls as well as touchscreen controls, and both work pretty well. On the bad side, players are given only very limited control of the camera – it can only move to four 90-degree angles around the player character, and this limitation at times makes it difficult to see everything around the player clearly.

Overall though, Lanternium is a decent, if a bit simple and straightforward, character-based Puzzle game. There’s nothing here that’s going to set the world on fire, but nothing particularly upsetting either, and the game does a good job catering to the wide audience it aims for with its family-friendly appeal. If you’re looking for a decent Puzzle game to add to your Nintendo Switch library, you could do far worse than Lanternium

tl;dr – Lanternium is a family-friendly character-based Puzzle game where players control chasing a fox to get back his cookies, and to do so must use a magic lantern to change color to open up walkable paths. There’s nothing truly revolutionary here, but it’s a solid game that does a good job being accessible to any audience. If you’re wanting another character-based Puzzle game to add to your Nintendo Switch library, Lanternium will likely satisfy that craving.

Grade: C+

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