[This is a guest review by Peevish. If you’d like to write a guest article for TIGSource, please go here.]
This month Fault Line was released.
I don’t know if you’ve been following Nitrome. I know I sure wasn’t. Their game Tiny Castle got a plug on the Indie Games Weblog as well as the AV Club’s Sawbuck Gamer column. And it was an interesting game, more for it’s idea that for how well it pulled it off.
But Fault Line has got me digging into their backlog.
In Fault Line, you play as a small and at least partially robotic hero working through a series of test chambers. Your primary ability: you can grab nodes on the walls and drag them together, compressing the Cartesian plane between:
It’s a really interesting mechanic. Compressing nodes can be used to attach separated rooms, to redirect lasers into breakable glass boxes, make elevators move through two levels at once, make mines disappear, and break connections between boxes that shoot deadly beams between them. It’s a small number of elements that yield a lot of puzzles. And the game does like to goose you on occasion, offering complex rooms with deceptively simple solutions.
Beyond that the game simply feels good to play. It has impeccable sound design and tuning, from the clang of every jump to the small amount of momentum your character builds up after running a half-second. While the flaunting of Euclidean geometry and test chamber environment does ring a bit of Portal, the game keeps a distinct and unique flavor. (It’s actually kind of interesting how many puzzle games are being repurposed into platformers and FPS’s.)
Fault Line isn’t perfect, largely since you can breeze through its thirty levels in as many minutes. Its mechanics are well explored but the game ends just when you start following its logic; many levels can be solved by grabbing nodes at random until a solution presents itself, and I only felt like I was mastering it by the second playthrough. Which points out its only glaring flaw: it would kill with a level editor.