Filament is an indie puzzle game set to be released in the first quarter of this year. It follows the story of a spaceman as he attempts to rescue the trapped pilot, Juniper, from a seemingly abandoned Filament Company research ship called the Alab⭕aster. To do this, players have to solve puzzles by winding a glowing cord around pillars to unlock more of the ship’s systems. The preview promises challenging puzzles and an intriguing story, and left me wanting more.
Simple Concepts
Puzzles in Filament are introduced through devices called Anchors, obstacles that are blocking some of the important systems of the ship. To access these systems and save Junipe𝓰r, you have to hack into them manually. The puzzles initially feel like a hacking mini-game, albeit more engaging.
The beginning puzzles in Filament are simple. There’s relatively little hand-holding since they are mostly self-explanatory. Whenever you hack into the anchors, you control a tiny robot with a glowing tether wire trailing behind it. To fix the anchor, you must wrap the tether around pillars that are scattered throughout the space, activating each of them without crossing the wires, and then 🤪leaving through an exit door. New elements are introduced at a relatively decent pace to keep things fresh, but even these are easy to understand through gameplay, with no real need for tutorials.
Scaling Challenges
While the puzzles are designed to be easily grasped with no instructions, this game is no walk in the park. Following a few shorter introductory levels every time a new concept is introduced, the puzzles become exponentially more challenging. When a game like Filament stick🎉s to one type of puzzle, it has to be a good puzzle, and these puzzles𒀰 deliver.
By avoiding a lot of gimmicks, Filament focuses on creating genuin𝓡ely challenging puzzles. The game’s harder levels feel like they are progressing on a theme within each anchor while never feeling repetitive. They are difficult while never feeling frustrating. It doesn’t feel like a slog to get stuck on these puzzles, more like an unraveling of a mystery as you figure out which paths and pillars can interact with each other in different ways.
The puzzles have no time limit or ranking for completing them. There’s no challenge to replay the puzzles, although you certainly can. Arguably, this makes it more satisfying. Filament is not a sprint. It’s about careful observation, problem-s🌌olving, and trial and error.
Comfortable Aesthetics
Outside of the puzzles, Filament offers a beautiful overworld and c⛎ompelling story. While the puzzles themselves take place in a dark room full of glowing pillars, the overworld offers cozy peeks into the world of the personಌal lives of the Alabaster’s crew and sweeping views into the vastness of space.
Everything about the game embodies charm. The cartoony art style is somehow nostalgic and personal while still conveying the sense of wonder that comes from gazing out into the universe. The music is similarly charming – a peaceful score that evokes a feeling of returning home. The more energetic variations on the musical theme work well with the puzzles, but one of the best parts of the game is the wave of calm thatౠ washes over while wandering through the empty hallways of the ship.
Compelling Story
The Filament preview presents the start of an intriguing mystery. It begins with the player docking onto a seemingly empty ship, but after boarding the vessel a voice starts spe✃aking. The pilot, Juniper, is trapped, and seemingly the only survivor. The voice acting for Juniper is, in a word, earn𝕴est. She remains hopeful and optimistic in the face of the mysterious disaster apparently destroyed her crew. Since the player character is mostly a blank slate avatar, it’s this performance that gives emotional weight to the game, especially when her feelings for her old crew show through her jokes.
Perhaps the best part of the story is the sense of mystery that the game creates. Between each set of puzzles, you can unlock a different crew m♋ember’s weekly computer password. You can then access certain crew email accounts and start to get an idea🍨 of who these people were, what relationships they had, and what their mission was on this ship. In the beginning, the emails were mostly benign, with hints at rising tensions and possible relationships between crew members.
It feels like you’re a detective, unraveling the sequence of events that led to the๊ disaster that befell the Alabaster. I’ve never had the feeling of “thank goodness I finished this puzzle so I can go read some emails” before when playing a game, but that’s what happened. I found myself checking each new password obsessively to see what else I could piece together from the information in these messages.
Unfortunately, while this is arguably the best part of the game, it also has a few bugs that make it difficult. The monitor sometimes displays a different menu than the one that is being navigated. It’s a small issꦅue that can be played around, but hopefully, it is fixed by release.
Still, the amateur email sleuth part of the🥃 game was genuinely engrossing and left me wanting more. The puzzles were enjoyable and challenging, but what makes me want to play the full game is purely my need to see what happens next.
A preview copy of Filament was provided for this review. Filament will be released for PC in Q1 2020.