Nestled in the corner of the Indie Mini Booth at PAX East isn’t always the best place if you want consistent eyeballs on your product. It’s out of the way and games are packed together like sardines in a tin, relegated to one monitor to make the experience happen. It takes a lot of grandiose gestures to get noticed.
Or, in the case of Linelight, a little. As an extremely aesthetically simple 1-dimensional game, it’s minimalism stuck out more than just about any other game in the space.
Linelight is extremely easy to explain: We are a simple straight line that moves forward along a single dimension. The game asks us to navigate along other lines on the screen from one end to the next, hopping back and forth between them and avoiding obstacles as needed. As we continue to play, the obstacles and puzzles become challenging, requiring us to activate switches, charge across moving platforms, and even backtrack on the screen multiple times.
Going hands-on with the PAX East demo build revealed one critical aspect of the game: the puzzles are never frustrating, and are instead meant to keep us involved and moving. If we fail at a puzzle, we either bypass it or keep trying until we get it. This “it’s okay to fail, just have a good time” theme allows us to feel as though we’re on a path to the end of the game no matter what we do, like we’re on the front end of a wave coming closer and closer to shore.
Except in this case it’s a straight line that can kink and turn as needed, can activate a switch, can avoid electric shocks and raise barriers. In several areas, moving forward means reversing direction and sliding my line backward in order to send it up instead of down. This “tail back” method lets me reach new switches, enter new areas, and avoid shock-inducing moving sparks.
The elegant simplicity of the game’s design extends to its visual aspects, where flashes of color and a terrific audio soundtrack round out the presentation.
And, that’s it. I don’t think Linelight is meant to be a tremendously involving game. Instead, it sort of seems to let us sink in, push forward, and dance our line along towards a refreshing completion.
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