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I always finish a game before I review it but my track record has been zero for two with regard to the Space Hole games. I love these games though so I’m just going to go ahead and review it because chances are I won’t finish this one either. And honestly, I don’t have to. Space Hole is not a game to me, it’s an experience. It’s an art installation that I can just lose myself in until I feel like I’ve had enough and it doesn’t beg me to complete it. Get this right now. Its about a dollar on launch sale and if you like trippy visuals, platforming, exploration, a solid soundtrack, marble rollers or indeed just Space in general, I urge you to pick this up.

+ wines age well….Space Holes evolve well. Space Hole 2020 in my opinion is another stride in Sam Atlas’s artistic vision. Don’t get me wrong, 2016 and 2018 are also great. But they lack the finesse and visual overload which 2020 brings. 2016 was platforming hell. 2018 was more of an exploration/easter egg hunt. 2020 is a bit of both while at the same time taping your eyes open Clockwork Orange style and saturating your brain with visual insanity.

+ DL Salo. head here to check out some of Salo’s work. [www.saintsalo.com] As always with the Space Hole games the music is really the glue that holds the whole experience together. We start the game with a crushing slow burn track that reminds me of Mogwai and then on some other levels we are on some Philip Glass types of arrangements. The sounds will really do wonders to your soul in this game.

+ experiment, explore, exit. Space Hole is a game to be played on your demands only. “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” as a famous Dr. once said. You are free to play as much or as little as you like of this game. So it has this casual feel to it but it is anything but a casual game.

- all CONS were ejected out the airlock and are lost to the depths of the universe.

The Space Hole project which has been in play since 2016 has seen a metamorphosis of the concept in it’s three installments. In the beginning there was an unforgiving marble runner platformer. 2018 was a more conceptual and exploration focused game with countless rabbit holes to fall into. 2020 is the same game but different. It wants to give rather than to receive. Reward rather than punish.

2020 was a pretty bad year. Space Hole 2020 is here to try and fix that. Buy it, put on some headphones and get legally high.

I have a soft spot for a good Hidden Object Game and Darkarta is no exception. It follows the few rules I have personally that make a HOG good. Also for a first effort from an Indie(an) development team, based out of Kerala, I was quite impressed by the quality of this game. I think the Indian background of the team made something quite magical and authentic feeling in this story of reincarnation and immortal deities.

I received this game for free from the developer. I would not have given it a Thums Up (sic) unless I felt it deserved it.

Please excuse the Indian puns. I have been there twice and really like the place. That’s all.

+ HOG which is light on the H. To be honest I play HOGs for the minigame puzzles and not the finding the list of items parts. There are only around 3 lists to score out and the rest of the hidden ones are shadow finding and linear scavenger hunts.

+ which brings us to the minigames. The minigames are fun and there is plenty of variety. Some of them were great twists on the classics. Others were ones I had never seen before. A lot of effort went into the minigames and I enjoyed them a lot.

+ how many cutscenes would you like? All of them. This game has a fair few well animated and fully voiced cutscenes. Sure there are parts that are over the top. Hey, it’s a Hidden Object Game after all. On the whole the movie parts of the game are really well done. HOGs that aren’t fully voiced are usually a full tier level below. I have grown to expect them now.

+ graphics and locations. The locations are beautiful in this game, full of colour and the screens are busy but not too busy.

- hitbox back button. The hitbox at the bottom near the inventory is too close to the main screen and I found myself exiting out of puzzles over and over again. A minor inconvenience at best.

- some puzzles. Some of the items were on a Broken Sword level of “wait, what? Is that really the solution?” Luckily there were only a few of these and for the most part I knew what items I was looking for and what went with what.

I’m always a bit worried when a developer offers me a free key for a game because I say to myself “ok, what’s the catch?” For this game there was no catch. The game was decent. It was second to naan…..sorry……I’ll see myself out now.

Puzzle Agent is a made for PC version of Professor Layton only with far fewer and less interesting puzzles and instead of being set in some quaint old village we are essentially dropped right into the movie Fargo with its snowy setting and “Ohhhh yaaaaaa! Wow!” dialogue. Puzzle Agent has a lot going for it but it fell really short on challenge and playtime. It still gets the thumbs up because the story was fun and I had a good time with the game overall and the price suits the short playthrough.

+ art. The artwork is unique and has a really comic book feel to it. I don’t know who the artist is but they mention them a lot so it must be a big deal. I liked the artwork.

+ casual. This is a great casual puzzle game to play when you are really looking for more story and dialogue than challenge. Hardcore puzzle fans will be left feeling a bit robbed if they go in to play this primarily as a puzzle game.

+ “Yaaa! Some hot dish!”. The voice acting is well above par for a game like this. I had a lot of fun just listening to them babble on about random stuff.

- faulty puzzles. No I’m not being bitter about not finishing the game with a perfect score but I really felt that either some of the puzzles were not explained well enough which led to me making a mistake or there was actually more than one solution for a couple of the puzzles. One puzzle in particular I think could have had multiple solutions but it wasn’t THE ANSWER that the devs had programmed.

- the end. It all ended rather abruptly with pretty much zero explanation. Not ideal in a situation where story is pretty much the catalyst for the game.

I think if you want a super casual puzzle game that is more cutscenes than puzzles (there are only around 35 puzzles in the whole game) then pick this up. It’s a fun way to kill a few hours and it won’t melt your brain.

THIS IS JUST A CUT AND PASTE OF MY REVIEW FROM THE "FREE" LIGHTMATTER STORE PAGE

Lightmatter took me 9 hours to complete both endings and while I wasn’t really satisfied with either ending, the journey to get there was a lot of fun. Lightmatter isn’t shy when it shows its love for Portal but it is really heavy on the mechanics from The Talos Principle. Instead of jammers, you’ve got spotlights and instead of connectors you’ve got photon connectors.

+ great antagonist. Virgil is no Cave Johnson or GlaDos but he is suitably condescending and megalomaniacal. I hated him but in a good way.

+ intelligent saves (for the most part). You will be consumed by the shadows….oh yeah I didn’t mention that standing on a shadow will tear you apart on a sub-atomic level did I? You will die in Lightmatter. A lot….if you are anything like me. Luckily if your puzzle solving was on the right track it will start you off from roughly where you just died. If you exit out of the game though it set me back to the beginning of the whole stage it seemed.

+ fluid movement. You move in a very Portal-esque butter-like smootheness and have an ample jump. There are some platforming moments in the game and you will be required to do a bit of gymnastics. But generally the game is focused on the puzzles.

+ puzzles. Lightmatter puzzles ramp very well and scaffold you along the way. They mostly fall in the range of just challenging enough to not feel too casual but there are some way easy ones and there are some that will really have you scratching your head until you hit that “oh, I’m an idiot” moment and realise the answer was right in front of you the entire time.

+ easter eggs. If you like finding these little moments in games, Lightmatter is stuffed with them. As you would imagine there are Portal ones galore and many more. I won’t spoil them here.

+ writing and voicing. Virgil and a woman we hear on some audio tapes are voiced excellently. There is also a ton of idle monologue. What I mean is that when you are solving a puzzle or are loitering in an area, Virgil will switch on his mic to berate you in a number of witty ways. These don’t seem to repeat and its little things like this that make a game for me.

+ options. There is a slew of options. A music player to sample the voice and the level music. Level selector to go back and hunt for missing achievements. There is also an unobtrusive speedrun stat tracker for all you speed demons.

+ you got something to say devs? Yes, yes they do. I am a sucker for a great director's commentary and there is a TON here.

- expectations. I expected another mechanic to be thrown in, like mirrors to reflect light, or a flashlight you could actually aim 360 degrees around a room (you can’t aim the spotlights, merely send light straight ahead). So when not even a 3rd item was found to spice up the puzzles, I felt a bit deflated.

- crashes. The game is brand new so I expect a patch soon for this but in some new sections, as if loading a new area of the map the game would crash to desktop. Luckily my autosave was always intact and I could continue as normal. In that respect it was a minor inconvenience. FIXED

So there you have Lightmatter. It’s a pretty smart puzzler that has some great moments and uses Talos Principle mechanics but sticks to a more humourous Portal kind of story. The games that it pays homage to are better though and I found Lightmatter to be on more of a Turing Test or Q.U.B.E. level of quality. Definitely a thumbs up though and worth a play.

Edit: Developers came through quick on fixing the crashes as promised. Also they continue to add minor fixes for visuals, controls and running the game. They recently added a ton of directors commentary which is really great to listen to. Thanks for this great game and your continued work on it post launch.

I am going to admit that I am not really a huge pixelart fan. I will often pass on games that are done in this style because it just doesn’t appeal to me. So when someone gifts me a game like this and it is as good as this it makes me rethink my boundaries of what I will and won’t wishlist. I remember getting The Lion’s Song in a bundle and was like “ok, I’ll farm it for cards” but I ended up playing the whole first act. It was a quick hop, skip and jump until I had completed the whole thing. Photographs followed pretty much the same curve, except someone had the perception to know what I would like rather than what I thought I liked and gifted me this game. Thank you so much for that.

So what is it? It’s a 5 story vignette about some different people. Some are directly in the same timeline and are interwoven loosely. You progress a narrative by looking around a photograph for an item, which then triggers a minigame, which in turn completes a part of the story. At the end of the game you will have to grind a little to see how all five stories conclude and I will tell you right now that the endings are all very satisfying. Photographs does not short change you on story.

The story is fully voiced and was wayyyyyyy darker than I expected. And this, for me, is a good thing.

+ story. I was quite shocked by the first story of a cute little girl and her grandfather. You will get no spoilers from me. As I said above I felt that each story was fully fleshed out and drew to a very decent conclusion by the end. This really good storytelling comes down to 3 things: excellent writing, excellent voice acting and some amazing methods in making pixel graphics convey emotion and cause.

+ short but sweet…..though often sour. Photographs repeatedly hits you over the head with some pretty stark realities but it feels fresh every time. The stories tell us so much in such a short time. And even though you see the darkness coming, you are eager to learn what kind of fate awaits your character each time.

+ voice acting. I’m not sure how Photographs would have fared as a text only game but I really think the devs made the right choice in going for a fully voiced game. The actors all do great jobs and it not only compliments the art in the game but for me, lifts it out of the pixelated 2D world and makes the characters much more three dimensional and real. Characters were varied and professional in their delivery.

- superdupercasualfuntimes. The puzzles are classic takes on some very well established puzzles. We have the match 3, tessellation puzzles, trajectory paths, colour flow and block puzzle. All of these have their own twists which is not bad. They just feel a bit odd. I would have much preferred to find objects on screen and keep progressing the story rather than play these odd casual F2P games. The match 3 game was just ridiculous and I found myself waiting for the skip button to eventually pop up so I could continue, rather than play it.

Yes, the minigames are annoying and in my opinion dampen the experience but don’t let that dissuade you. The skip function exists and therefore there is no way you will get stuck and be unable to see the story all the way through to the end. I shed a few tears at the end of Photographs, that was how much the game moved me at points. So the minor annoyances were worth pushing through. Playtime was 4 hours for all endings for me so you tally that bang for your buck ratio and see if the price point works for you.

I have been waiting for this game for a long time and when it finally landed on Steam a year late, it was a day 1 buy in no questions asked. I finished it in a couple of days and it was worth every penny. I played this one off the back of finishing Antichamber and it might just be the perfect comedown game to that, The Witness, Portal or The Talos Principle. That hollow feeling I get when I say goodbye to an awesome game was nicely filled in by Manifold Garden and I’m here to tell you why.

+ humble. Manifold Garden knows what it is right from the very start, which is a very beautiful walk through an MC Escher-like world. And even though it is a unique puzzle game that holds its own, it is also a loveletter to the greats that came before it and most likely inspired it. There are even cheevos named “Witness the Laser” and “Now You’re Thinking with Portals.”

+ familiar but fresh. Sure it has light bridges from Portal, giant Tetris blocks, companion cubes and perspective shifts from Antichamber but they are all presented in a way that will make you say “oh, that’s clever” and they then become Manifold Garden’s property and are not just shamefully stolen from other puzzle games.

+ easy on the curves. I found the difficulty curve to be very fair in this game. I don’t think I was ever fully blocked on a puzzle even though when you first enter an area and see the size of it you might be daunted and let out a big sigh. Every new mechanic has a tutorial room to help you understand it. But make no mistake there will be a few areas where you will get stuck and the game is not without its challenges. You might even find that there is an entirely new playthrough waiting for you to unlock some seemingly impossible cheevos.

+ soothing. Maybe it’s the music. Maybe it’s the way you can base jump into infinity and just fall forever on a constant loop. Maybe it’s the simple visuals and freedom of movement. There is just something so calming about Manifold Garden. There is no urgency. No countdown timers, no fail conditions, no threats. This game is pretty zen.

+ “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” - Albert Einstein. The music and sounds in this game are….well without hyperbole….perfect. I couldn’t have asked for more. Every single in game sound has this very satisfying feeling. The music seems to swell as you are advancing things and feeds your excitement for puzzle solving. Aural excellence.

- story. I know. I can hear you now shouting “Not everything needs a story!” But for me it does. Otherwise I have to make one up. And if I was good at making up stories I would be writing them, not playing games on Steam. Manifold Garden is sorely lacking in the story department. It is not the kind of game where there are other NPCs to meet and there is really not much in the way for a vehicle for storytelling, verbal or otherwise. I was hoping for a solid ending to at least give me a sniff of a story but I got none. A lot of people say the ending is amazing. I just think it was pretty.

- playtime. It took me 9 hours to finish this. I gawk, I take screenshots, I just bask in the game I play that are good. If you are an objective focused, laser guided missile then expect a playtime of around half of mine and then you decide if the cost:time ratio works for you.

If walking along all 6 planes of a Rubik’s Cube and slotting smaller cubes into place whilst trying to overcome gravity and wrapping your head around Cartesian coordinates so you can base jump sideways falling up the z-axis sounds like fun then I would say….Buy This Game. Do it for the hypercubes that release all the little birdies.

I will be honest. When I first played Antichamber I didn’t like it. The visuals put me off, not because I wanted better visuals but because I had this dumb notion that if the graphics were not good then how could I trust that the puzzles were watertight? Once I finally overcame this utter stupidity, I was ready to play Antichamber. Not all puzzle games need to be visually awesome like Talos, Witness and Portal. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I was high…..but I couldn’t have been high because when I started getting into Antichamber I felt like I was REALLY high….like call me an ambulance, my brain is turning into jelly, high.

Don’t be like me. Please, if you like amazing puzzle games, play Antichamber for more than 3 hours. You have to cross that threshold. Let getting the blue gun be like “somewhere outside Barstow on the edge of the desert,” and then you can really dive deep into the rabbit hole.

+ incredibly complex, yet simple. Yes you will be baffled at the start. Don’t worry. That’s the point. Antichamber wants you to take everything you think you know about puzzle games, maps, geometry, physics and even life itself and take a step to the left into the 5th dimension. Up is down, down is strawberry jam and backwards is yes. Antichamber will not allow you to take full control until the very end and will do its utmost to marinade your brain for as long as possible. But at the right time you will be Neo in The Matrix and you will laugh at how all these puzzles confused you at first.

+ experimentation. So if I pull a cube on the x-y axis I can move it into position to open a door! Awesome! Wait….this is just a crazy idea but what would happen if I pulled it along the z-axis? Would that even work? The only way to advance in Antichamber is to be creative, think outside the box and don’t be limited by your own imagination. You will find yourself up against impossible odds…..and quite frankly they are impossible by definition because they defy the laws of physics, so thinking about them rationally just won’t do. You need to figure out your own lifehacks to this bizarre dimension.

+ wait….are those electrons….pigeons? The sounds in Antichamber are fantastic. The music is great and is so subtle as to not take you out of the game or to give you a false hope you are gaining traction in a certain area. The whole soundboard and soundtrack is sublime. Mad flashing electrons flutter around like pigeons in a coop, you will fall through huge holes to crashing thunder and land in a puddle of water despite everything being white walls and floors with almost no frills attached.

- difficulty curve. While most puzzlers start small and scaffold you up, Antichamber, well, does the anti of that and starts big and then the game gets easier over time. This was incredibly frustrating for me because I didn’t know if what I was trying was even correct and I didn’t know if I could trust the programming or puzzles of the game. Were there glitches and bugs? Was the puzzle logical? I can say now looking back that yes, the game is solid but I see a ton of friends who own this game who never made it past the 90 minute mark. Either they farmed it for cards or they just gave up. And I totally understand that.

- am I doing this right? There are no cheevos for Antichamber. So I think I did all the extra stuff? But I’m not sure. This game is very much like The Witness in that the rewards for completing the hard tasks is the knowledge that you completed them but even in The Witness there are 2 cheevos. One for completing the game and then one for COMPLETING THE GAME.

Antichamber is an incredible game. The poor developer Alexander Bruce was the only developer and he got so burnt out by the game it looks like he has given it all up and is now a regular software engineer for a tech company. Even if this is the only game he ever makes it will stand as a testament to how insane you can push the limits of something and people will still manage to unravel your madness and not only will they solve it…..they will enjoy it.

I am so happy I pushed through Antichamber. Don’t be like 90 minute Antichamber me. Challenge your mind and defeat String Theory.

This 'game' is going for something like the so-bad-its-good thing but it never reaches that point. I really was hoping for a game that was so terribly bad it was good like Press X Not To Die but all we are getting here is a 15 minute high school project.

+ the title song. Say what you will about this game but the title track is great. It is an original song that will maybe remind you of some Tenacious D acoustic track. I might be overhyping this because I think this is going to be my only positive comment.

- sound. I am not going to berate the acting. Let's be serious here, there is no acting. But we need audio. The lines are mumbled, the sound recording is garbage and the audio quality is all over the place.

- optimization. The screen opens windowed and if you full screen it it is way off to the left. There is no Steam overlay function and therefore the game is lacking the one thing that might make it fun which is sharing some screenshots with the community.

I'm not going to bang on about how bad this game is. It is a good start for a couple of kids on a limited budget. It is way more than I could ever do. I once coded a 10 page choose your own adventure in BASIC (with pictures) and from that day forward I left coding to the pros.

This game though is pretty bad. There are only a couple of scenes, virtually nothing to do but pick the dialogue option that doesn't get you killed and most importantly HAS NO ZOMBIES.

Arrog is a short but sweet interactive art piece which is really just a metaphor for life. You are born, you move through life and solve some puzzles and then you die.

This is a very short game coming in at a whopping 30 minutes to 100% complete with all cheevos. So bear that in mind when eyeing up the price tag.

+ hand drawn. I’m a sucker for hand drawn art in games and Arrog has a very simple but captivating art style. In places it reminded me of a black and white sketch from some Samorost scenes.

+ ambiance. The sound effects and music lull you into the dream like state the game is trying to bring you to and it does it well.

+ hope. As someone who fears death yet finds myself flinging myself at it full throttle with my terrible life habits, this game offered a nice little silver lining. Yes the game is quite sad but it has a message and you can decide what that message is.

- price. This is all down to personal choice but 3 bucks for 30 minutes…..you decide.

Very short experience but one I am glad to have had. I am all down for letting devs define what a game actually “is” and experimenting with new ideas.

When playing The 39 Steps, you might catch yourself thinking, “meh, I’ve seen this all before.” But just bear in mind that this is one of, if not, THE first. Some would argue that the one man vs everyone on the run genre from Mission Impossible, the Bournes, North by Northwest, The Fugitive, Minority Report, etc was hatched from Buchan’s novel that this game is based on.
Now I use game in a very loose way here. This is a visual novel you can drink a cup of tea in one hand while you advance the scenes with your other. There are a few quite silly QTEs but mostly you will just be taking in the beautiful artwork and following the voiced conversations and reading the occasional newspaper or scrap of paper. The story is the real reason we are here and the game is just a vehicle for that.

+ authentic. Whatever faults you find with this game, you cannot fault them for authenticity. This game is a direct lift from the book unlike the multiple movies that have been shot. Also the voice acting is incredibly real. Real enough to the point that you will need subtitles if you are not from Scotland. I’m from Scotland and there were even points where I had to tilt my ear to the speaker and pay full attention.

+ artwork. There are so many beautiful backdrops in the game. Nothing in the game is animated to move but the artists have really put it all into gorgeous natural vistas. I took a fair amount of screenshots.

+ voice acting. As noted above the voices are very authentic but not only that, they are well acted too. Hannay our main protagonist is a suave citizen with a knack for espionage and assumes the identities of a bunch of different walks of life in his efforts to evade his pursuers. Other characters in the game are equally voiced and this made the game way more enjoyable than me just clicking through walls of text.

- convenience. Now, I did say before that The 39 Steps was the genesis of this genre but at the same time I need to call out the plot for its hugely convenient moments where things just seem to fall out of the sky for the main character. In a bit of a pickle? Don’t worry, here is a case of dynamite. Need a quick alibi? Don’t worry you just made a new friend who will cover for you. There are plenty more examples of this but it would be anachronistic of me to fault the story. I imagine this was totally fine back in the day.

- oh, about those QTEs. They are not even Quick….or even Timed. That makes them just, I don’t know, E’s. I do not need a QTE to make a cup of coffee or to get dressed. It’s almost like the devs said, “There’s no game here. It’s just a story you click through. Shall we just add a dozen random QTEs?”

The 39 Steps is a great story to mouse over while you unwind at the end of the day and don’t want to think or move too much. It is an easy 100% cheevo too if that’s your thing. If you liked this game then Simon Meek went on to form his own studio The Secret Experiment after this and they released a game called Beckett, which I already own but haven’t played yet. So I suppose I know what I will be trying next.