Filament Reviews

There are nice things about this game, and not-so-nice things about this game. The positive:[list][*]Good music, set design, and voice acting. [*]Good puzzle concepts and mechanics — very reminiscent of The Witness. [*]Puzzles get interesting and challenging, especially near the end (again, like The Witness). [*]Non-linear, though I could understand all the mechanics from the first puzzles. Everything is well-gated, too — better than The Witness, even. [*]Decent lore — somewhat reminiscent of The Talos Principle.[/list] The negative:[list][*]The ending left me a little confused, like it was disconnected entirely from the rest of the game. [*]The plot is a little reminiscent of The Swapper, but without all the philosophical stuff: a crew once lived and worked on a ship in space, and then disappeared due to circumstances related to what they were working on/with. The problem with this type of plot is that it's a little detached, and here even more so since you come purely as an outsider. More would be needed to really tie things together (e.g. why did you come to the Alabaster in the first place? Who is the player character? Theorycrafting should not have to fill these holes!). [*]Some puzzles have that uncomfortable "near-solution" or "near-non-solution" feel to them. Those never feel good in any puzzle game. [*]The gameplay has some QoL issues: while you can choose to play without hints (the default), for those who choose to play with hints, you're given only two hints per puzzle, except you can instantly get new hints by exiting and re-entering, so limiting hints like this on the spot is pointless. Other puzzle games put hints on a timer. In addition, some of the hints were confusing in how they were given (e.g. with multiple robots), or outright useless (e.g. in the late-game "Riser" level). [*]Related to hints: the game says that you won't get the "No Anchor Too Great" achievement unless you have hints strictly disabled, but a better solution would just be to change the achievement description so that it says "without hints", and track whether or not the player has used a single hint in a given playthrough. [*]Another QoL issue ties in more to how the puzzles get solved: (1) as I was solving, I desperately wanted to keep the bird's eye view [i]and[/i] move simultaneously, especially for larger puzzles; (2) I often wanted to "pick up and re-shape" the wire without backtracking the robot(s). I understand why/how the latter part was designed as it was, but still, it seems like a flaw not to be able to "re-draw" the wire on the spot. Both of these made solving the puzzles mildly uncomfortable. [*]There are lots of cool secrets! But a few too many of them get too esoterically cryptic — you'll need a notepad, and more than just what's in the Steam Overlay, too. You (almost) never needed such a thing for The Witness nor Tunic.[/list] At the end of the day, it's not inherently a bad game, just a few design decisions that weren't made well.

It's not a difficulty curve, but a difficulty wall... also I feel like there were two different stories told, which made no sense (maybe it's explained at the end, but I dropped before that)