Glass Masquerade

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Glass Masquerade Double Pack along with Glass Masquerade 2: Illusions, as well as the Indie Puzzle Bundle Vol. 1, along with Letter Quest Remastered, Pipe Push Paradise, and Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut.)

Glass Masquerade is a Puzzle game that has the player assembling the faces of clocks composed of pieces of stained glass. In practice, this is essentially a glorified jigsaw puzzle, but instead of the usual jiggy pieces, you’re fitting together shards of glass.

Visually, the art design in this game is absolutely stunning. The menus are gorgeous, and the clocks themselves look absolutely beautiful. A lot of love clearly went into the visual design of this game. The game’s music, similarly, is really nice… I only wish the same care had gone into the gameplay…

The core gameplay of this game is fine. It’s a puzzle, you’re piecing it together. Again, not too far off from a jigsaw puzzle. The game complicates matters a bit by having all of the pieces blacked-out, upside-down, and spun around until you pick them up, and you can only view one piece at a time, adding to the challenge. This, also, is fine. What is not fine is the controls.

Honestly, I don’t know what the heck went wrong here. The controls for this game are so incredibly laggy that the cursor onscreen will move for seconds after you stop touching it. And let me be clear, this isn’t a Joycon drift issue – I have plenty of experience with that. No, this is an issue with the game’s controls being terrible and unresponsive, almost as if you’re playing the game with a “drunk” filter on the controls.

I tried the game out in portable mode too, in hopes that the game would use touchscreen controls that would hopefully remedy this issue. And they did… but only replaced it with the issue that the puzzle pieces are so small that the moment you touch one with your finger, you’ll be covering it up, making the game impossible to play effectively.

And that’s Glass Masquerade, a game with a good concept, and phenomenal aesthetic design, that is absolutely crippled by terrible controls. If you have one of those precision capacative styluses, or a lot of patience with terrible control schemes, there’s a lot to love here. But otherwise, this game is just pure frustration wrapped in a pretty package.

tl;dr – Glass Masquerade is a puzzle game that has you piecing together absolutely gorgeous stained glass clock faces much like you would work on a jigsaw puzzle. Unfortunately the controls are absolutely atrocious and ruin the whole experience.

Grade: C-

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