Blinded by the Linelight

"Linelight is a refreshingly inventive, minimalist puzzle-adventure game." ... it's not as pretentious as it sounds, I promise.

Linelight is a puzzle-platformer, although it doesn't immediately identify itself as such. Imagine if a game like Limbo or Braid replaced the ground with a line, and your character with a line segment, and you'll basically have it. It's abstract; like Thomas Was Alone, but without a narrator. Just ... shapes.

It starts off easy enough: follow this path instead of that one, hit these switches and not those other ones, time your movement to avoid the evil red lines. In fact, I would say that most of the game is "simple," either in being outright easy, or in teaching you new mechanics so elegantly that it never feels like a struggle. Up until the end, the game's pace of introducing new rules and tricks is actually quite commendable.

But, there are a couple sore spots that I would say hold Linelight back from its full potential. For one, the theme is utterly uninteresting -- you are a line, and you move along other lines, and there are colors, and, uh, lighting effects. The music is nice, but gets repetitive after a few minutes. Ultimately there isn't much of Linelight that's memorable. (Other than the final sequence of World 6, which is pretty delightful.)

For another, the game is occasionally mechanically inconsistent, with rules applying differently in some levels than in others. This is the kind of thing that would make Jonathan Blow lose his fucking mind -- although it only happens a handful of times.

I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I had to look up the solution to the last bonus world's final puzzle. It used a pre-existing obstacle in a different way than any preceding level had used it. I'm not thrilled about that; but, only one puzzle? Not a huge deal.

Linelight succeeds in delivering fun and engaging gameplay, and has a satisfying amount of puzzle content. It just doesn't stand out quite enough to be memorable among its puzzle-platformer peers.

Better than: Limbo
Not as good as: Braid, Thomas Was Alone
And it's more surprising than it is frustrating: that in 2017, a Unity-engine game would be released without Steam Cloud saves.

Progress: 240/240 yellow stars, 12/60 green stars