November Assassination #2 (SG Win)

Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!

I really, really tried to give it a fair chance, but Semblance never rises from the status of "cool-idea-on-paper-but-not-enough-to-justify-a-full-priced-game". The premise of shaping the world to complete your platforming goals sounds great, until you start to notice the controls are not finely tuned to challenges/mechanics, and you're suddenly trying to beat the controls, not the levels. This reminds me a lot of Hue, a cool gimmick that become a chore when it's forced into a full game.

The main issues with Semblance are that you can't finely control how you deform the ground, and that later on it requires precise timing without giving you precise controls to achieve that. It's one of those games where you're presented with a puzzle screen (puzzles hardly are bigger than one screen), look at it for a while, and probably is able to figure out what to do in a few seconds, but take minutes to actually achieve it with the given controls. In the worst case, you look at the screen and has no idea what to do, and decide to just try everything to see what sticks.

This is a puzzle design philosophy that is the opposite of great games such as Baba Is You, Snakebird, or Stephen's Sausage Roll. Those games are evergreen puzzle games for a reason, and it is because they take out all the mechanical difficulty of a puzzle (be it precision control or timing), relying solely on BRAINZ. Which is not what could be said of Semblance.

Arguably, the visuals are pretty good with great use of color and minimalistic, geometric environment and props, and the music is quite atmospheric and relaxing, fitting the game's world really well. Some say the best stories are told wordlessly, but Semblance's plot fall to the ground if you try to inspect it too closely. If the gameplay was good, I would be willing to overlook all of that but in the current state, it's not a puzzle game I'd recommend