This tedium in the puzzles is only further reinforced in the ‘gameplay’ features of the story section – where the player wanders the art-deco nightmare that is the Penrose Hotel, living out the same day over and over again. Nothing made me feel challenged in a way that needs creative, abstract thinking – merely able to put 2 and 2 together. Nothing prompted an ‘ooohhhh’ moment where everything ‘clicks’. The addition of more colours to transfer doesn’t make the player think of all the new possibilities opened up in the same way that a new block does in Infinifactory or new mechanic in Portal does (where they’re used in interesting new ways) but only increases the labour of getting from point A to B.
The ‘flow’ state often sought after by puzzle games, where challenge rises to match growing ability, is almost non-existent, the game not reaching much further than its original difficulty, only adding layers of busywork into the equation.
#INFINIFACTORY LOGIC GATES FULL#
Some of the puzzles require the player to pass through a sequence of gates, but incorrect planning can lead to a full restart of a puzzle – creating nothing but tedium for the player as they wander through long tracts of bland black corridor. There’s plenty of promise in the opening levels when the player is just getting to grips with the mechanics – but four ‘stages’ in and the cracks start to show. The key mechanic of the game involves changing coloured blocks – clicking on them to ‘absorb’ the colour into the player (allowing them to bypass certain coloured doors) and replace the block colour with whatever they were previously holding. The puzzles themselves leave a lot to be desired. Many of the problems with The Spectrum Retreat come from the nature of its design – the ‘Groundhog Day’ stylings of its setting cause arbitrary, repetitive gameplay and story segments, as well as producing flat, boring-looking puzzle chambers and environments that don’t really challenge the player to look further than one or two steps ahead.
Maybe if I’d have waded through another few hours of content, the game might have rewarded me with some kind of payoff, but by roughly halfway through the game I was already bored to tears. Going into The Spectrum Retreat, the first game from BAFTA-winning game designer Dan Smith, expectations are high for a novel, unique and challenging puzzle experience – expectations that go completely unmet.Ī disclaimer before starting this review – I didn’t finish The Spectrum Retreat. We’ve had the quaint pop-up-book pleasure of Hidden Folks, the painterly artistic vision of Gorogoa, the intriguing Sexy Brutale, and the relentlessly difficult Steven’s Sausage Roll.
#INFINIFACTORY LOGIC GATES TORRENT#
We’ve been treated to the gorgeously simple world of Jonathan Blow’s The Witness and a torrent of high-quality Zachtronics games such as Infinifactory and Opus Magnum that allow players to forge creative solutions to tough problems. The puzzle genre has had something of a renaissance in recent years.
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