BLAEO — Backlog Assassins Extraordinaire

Between this game and Portal, I wonder what some of these people look for in puzzle games, because it sure as heck isn’t good puzzle design.

Attractio

6 hours playtime

7 of 18 achievements

This is a hidden-object/First-Person-Shooter hybrid. Certain levels have you play as one (or, in a few cases, two) of three different characters, though the only mechanical difference between them are the items they have: one can change your own gravity between up and down (R1), the second has a gun that can change the gravity of blocks to any of the six axes (equip direction with D-pad or L3/R3, fire with R2), and the third can do both. There are also three block types: normal, large (can’t be picked up/carried), and gravity-changing, which reflect blocks away from them upon collision.

One of my main issues with this is an issue I have with all first-person “puzzle” games: because it’s in first person, half of the challenge isn’t in actually solving the “puzzles,” but in panning the camera around every corner of every room to make sure there isn’t a crucial block or alcove hidden somewhere that you missed. For example, not long into the green chambers, you’ll come across a hall with a low ceiling, followed by a lava pit and a single block in the distance. However, no matter which order you change the block’s gravity, you won’t be able to get it to your side because it’ll either hit the low ceiling and stop well before being in reach, or it’ll fall down past the lava. Turns out, if you get really close to the edge of the lava without falling in, you can just barely see that there’s a second block above the first, and that’s the one you need to work with in order to get the blocks over to where you are. The game does stuff like this quite a few times, so you can never be sure if it’s an actual puzzle that you’re having trouble solving or if there’s a hole in the wall (not to be confused with glass, another wall tile) that will just let you shoot the block to where you need it. Compare this with any 2D puzzle game worth its salt, like Toki Tori 1, Prince Yeh Rude, or Sutte Hakkun (or heck, even World of Goo): all of these games either have the entire puzzle on screen or let you move the camera around the entire stage, regardless of where you are. That way, you know exactly where everything is and what all you can work with. In contrast, not knowing everything you can work with is par for the course for first-person “puzzle” games, but that doesn’t require you to stop and think; it requires you to wander around aimlessly on the off chance you stumble across an item or opening you missed that suddenly causes everything to fall into place, and that isn’t fun.

Like with Portal, there were only a couple levels that I found to be actually designed around making you think about how everything works with each other: the final two tag-team levels in the story campaign (but even they weren’t entirely immune to hidden-object-isms). Speaking of team levels, the game requires both teammates to be standing right in front of the exit door to trigger the next level (instead of simply letting both be in that tiny room that doesn’t have anything else in it anyway), so there’s a bit of arbitrary logic in the game, too.

To make things worse, the last few levels are based less on testing what you know and more about introducing new gimmicks and hazards. I admit that action games introducing gimmicks is more of a pet peeve (and in some cases, necessary for variety due to lack of any half-way decent level design or proper difficulty curve), but it’s completely antithetical to good puzzle design. Rather than test the player’s knowledge of the mechanics, the player has to undergo trial-and-error in order to figure out the what is even possible before going on to solve the puzzle, and that isn’t fun, either. To provide examples, I’m going to spoil the “solutions” to the last few “puzzles” in the game:

First room: On the left is a block pushing a switch down. Lifting the block and deactivating the switch turns gravity off entirely, so you can only move by shooting in the opposite direction. The rest of the game never had anything like this, and as you can imagine, its extremely awkward to control. However, there’s also a grid of lasers blocking your path! How do you get past them? Simple, there’s another switch just sitting there on the opposite side of the room that turns them all off; just take the block from the first switch and put it on the other switch.

Second room: While earlier rooms required some action elements to progress (e.g. run past a large block before it crushes you, shoot and change the gravity of a block mid-fall, change your own gravity mid-run so you fall in a nook rather than slide past it due to how the game’s physics work, etc), this one drops the pretense and goes full-on action, featuring nothing but winding corridors and mobile rocket launchers. Oh, but there’s a switch on the ceiling and a block at the end, so I guess they just put in the bare minimum to meet industry standards and called it a day.

Third room: This is a two-for-one: Not only do we have hidden corridors (you’d only see them by going to the corners and looking directly up), but there’s also a new gimmick where you have to get on the block and ride it up the corridors (before now, blocks with gravity facing up would fall under your weight if you stood on them), at which point it hits a block barrier, causing the physics to bounce you up just enough so that you can either switch gravity and land safely, or use your gun to shoot the block hidden in that nook before you start to fall again. Plus, if you get on the block from the wrong side and ride it downward, not only will you take fall damage, but you’ll still bounce just as high as if you rode it upward, causing you to take fall damage again and die. This is why I hate “puzzles” that, rather than teach you how they work (whether by text or game-play), instead rely on knowledge of “realistic” physics or other “realistic” interactions: no matter what, there’s still going to be video-game-isms that make no sense and break the veneer of realism, yet we’re still expected to work around them to see what parts of the game match real life and what doesn’t; it’s no better than any other riddle-based “puzzle.”

Fourth room: This one’s a boss fight, and it’s the only other room to use the anti-gravity physics. Now, not only do you have to figure out what arbitrary series of events will lead to progress (“how was I supposed to know that turning the gravity back on would spawn rocket launchers? They didn’t spawn when gravity was on earlier!”), but you have to do it with really unwieldy controls. There are even times you have to lead the boss into the laser in the center, all the while it’s chasing you and you don’t have accurate control over yourself. Not only is that action instead of puzzle, that’s bad action.

So yeah, this one’s not recommended. Games like this are why I don’t buy puzzle games anymore (and why I’m hesitant even to enter SG giveaways for “puzzle” games).