Line Time

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Line Time is a Puzzle Game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game, set on what appears to be a space station, has players rearranging a sequence of commands to direct balls of colored light to green goal squares.

Honestly, the space station thing is kinda’ inexplicable. It doesn’t affect the gameplay at all, only seems to give an aesthetic element in menus, and otherwise seems little more than a distraction, with this game’s visuals in 3D when the gameplay is entirely 2D with extremely simple visuals. The result is a game that is nearly 1GB big when the game itself could have easily been a small fraction of that, and it doesn’t even benefit visually from this extra bloat while you’re actually playing the game. At the very least the game’s atmospheric synthesized background music gives a pleasant dreamlike tone that’s kinda’ nice, meaning the effort spent on presentation isn’t entirely wasted.

For the gameplay itself, you’re just swapping arrows on a set of instructions before starting the elements of the puzzle moving, trying to get the balls of light where they need to be. This starts out simple enough, but soon it becomes increasingly difficult to wrap your head around the way the balls interact with the various tiles, as well as each other.

Overall, while there’s nothing outright broken about Line Time, I found the gameplay to be more tedious and frustrating than fun, and the presentation is far too unimpressive for the amount of space it takes up in your Nintendo Switch’s memory. I suggest you skip this one.

tl;dr – Line Time is a Puzzle Game where players swap in and out a series of instructions to balls of light on a grid to ensure that all of them arrive at goal squares. The gameplay starts simple but quickly gets overly complicated, and all the memory space this game uses for its space station setting is wasted on gameplay focused on looking at a plain screen. Skip this one.

Grade: C-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award

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