Whitematter

its portal 3 if portal didnt have portals - hours of puzzle solving fun - some hours of frustration - worth my money

Push through test chambers in a mysterious research facility by using gravity, cubes, and switches, and not worry about speed. As is often the case in puzzle focused games, the main attraction is not the character you control but the world you are placed in. The narrative begins in a familiar setting, a research facility that also functions as a testing ground. Your task is to progress through a series of test that don’t really reveal the reason behind them. There is an added layer of mystery since the company in charge has recently obtained a fragment of an asteroid. When you exit the elevator, the place is empty. Even the receptionist has disappeared, with the excuse that everyone is attending an important meeting. Instead of human guidance, instructions come through the speakers. A friendly voice gives you directions, but this person has not been told about the meeting either and admits to being out of the loop. The first puzzles are designed to introduce the essential mechanics. The central idea is gravity manipulation, which occurs when you walk over a special pad. Each pad has an entrance marker that shows how gravity will shift once you step on it. The change is not random, so you always know what to expect. These shifts allow you to walk along walls or even ceilings. The other primary elements are cubes and switches. Pressing a switch opens a hatch that produces a cube. Cubes must be placed on cube pads in order to open doors and advance. To make these connections clear, colored lines of energy show how switches and pads are connected to other objects in a room. Each hatch contains only one cube, and pressing the switch again causes the cube to vanish wherever it is before appearing again at the hatch. Because gravity can be disorienting, every cube has an arrow that shows the direction it will fall. In normal conditions the arrow points downward. The real challenge begins when different cubes in the same room respond to different gravitational pulls. One hatch may release a cube that falls in the usual downward direction, while another may release one that is drawn to the left. This matters because cube pads only activate if gravity presses the cube into them. You cannot simply attach a cube to a wall mounted pad, since it will always fall in the direction of its assigned gravity. A further complication is that cubes maintain their gravity even when you change your own. If a cube is tied to the leftward pull, it will always move left regardless of your orientation. Once you drop it, its direction locks until you pick it up again. The key to solving these puzzles is to step on gravity pads until the cube’s arrow matches the orientation of the cube pad. After that you can change your own gravity so that your down direction matches the cube’s, allowing you to place it correctly. As the facility opens up, new mechanics appear to keep the experience varied. Launch pads throw you across rooms. Rotating panels rearrange the layout. Force fields block you from passing with a cube. From time to time tremors shake the chambers, breaking open hidden spaces. These secret areas contain recordings that hint at deeper mystery, and they’re hard to miss. The same goes for notepads. One drawback is the lack of prompts when interacting with objects. Picking up a cube or using a switch offers no visual indicator, which can become frustrating. While this absence is not too disruptive in some puzzles, it becomes a problem in fast moving sections. For example, when you are launched through the air and must press a switch quickly, it is never clear whether you are close enough for the interaction to succeed. Overall, the game offers an enjoyable experience that allows players to move at their own pace. Each chamber concludes with a leaderboard showing how quickly you completed it compared to others, but speed is never essential. Most of the achievements are straightforward, but two of them feel poorly conceived. The first requires completing every puzzle without using the colored power lines. Since these lines are designed to help players understand how switches and pads connect, turning them off on a first playthrough would be unreasonable. It is clearly intended for a second run, yet even then it feels more like an unnecessary restriction. The second troublesome achievement asks you to locate every security camera hidden throughout the facility. There are more than one hundred and forty in total, scattered across rooms and corridors. The problem is that the game never provides feedback when you have discovered one. Simply looking at a camera does not register it. It seems you must walk very close for the game to acknowledge the discovery, but there is no visual or audio confirmation to let you know it has been counted.