ted lauterbach’s sutef is a series of puzzles in which information is often hidden or obsfucated: there are invisible triggers that change the layout of the screen, other characters who move through the maze with their own agency, thick clusters of on/off blocks that are difficult to keep track of. “solving” a scene is always in large part a matter of continually stumbling forward (helpfully, the protagonist has a very small range of verbs), which suits lauterbach’s vision of hell as a dark procession of hostile encounters in which neither the rules nor the bounds can ever be totally known.
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eschew obfuscation
mmm… played this a fair bit – and although it IS obfuscated, the game does a pretty good job of introducing you to this.
The first few times everything changes on you it’s whilst you’re on the only posisble path at that point; and this teaches you that at a certain point in your progress things will change.
Later on, the changes get nastier and sometimes you’re left not knowing where to go – I remember one particular point where I’d gone as far as I could, and the remaining jump I knew I couldn’t make. But I’d been taught, by that point, to make the jump anyway – and indeed things changed and I landed safely and was able to progress.
There’s a few other changes I found that you had to go looking for off the obvious path, but those were to optional bits.
So overall it works. But mainly it’s a blocks-and-switches puzzle game.
If I had one complaint, it would be that there are a few points where blocks are acting under reversed gravity, but doing so in a space that is only just tall enough for a block, so there’s no indication that they will fly upwards – which makes for a few restarts whilst you learn a levels properties. This could hve been alleviated by giving blocks some form of indication – either make them slightly shorter so that you can see whether they are on the ground of the ceiling, or perhaps some fluid in the middle to show which way they are being pulled.
Other than that, an interesting little game. Though rather jarringly loud.
I played it start to finish a few days back. I very rarely had problems with reversed gravity, usually I saw the gravity inversion tiles and they were animated.
On the plus side I did like the twist where the main character was wounded at some levels, thus handicapped and couldn’t perform all his usual moves. There was enough variation in the puzzles and it showed that no character move was added without extensive thought of the levels – it felt like everything was used exhaustingly.
Negatives… the story was errr what the hell is happening here? Also, it became very hard towards the end, to the point that I did go to some areas of the level not because I thought of something to do there, but there was an object I could manipulate – so I just tried it to see how it could help me. Also, huge minus for not being able to move left/right while jumping – highly annoying.
All in all, good but not something I’d play again any time soon (if ever).
i think the story contains deliberate holes – there’s a whole chapter in the menu, after all, that we don’t get to see (as far as i know). as players, we’re used to being given complete information, both mechanical and narrative, and it suits the tone of this game that (in places) we’re denied both of these things.
the inability to move while jumping seems like an important constraint, especially given all of the gravity-swapping that goes on. giving the player a greater range of action would only make the game even more confusing: the half-fumbling way that the player progresses through each screen is really only possible because the protagonist has such a limited range of actions (and i appreciate, too, how that range of actions is often restricted even further).
This game really feels like the kin of James Burton’s Stardust, a similarly constrained puzzle platformer. In that respect, no air control is fine. But what seems kind of nonsensical is being unable to turn around. (This makes one of the Void Rim levels quite maddening.)
I must say, I never even noticed that there was a lack of air control – but I know just the level you mean with the turning around thing. There’s a whole stupid “Jump to this block then drop down and now you’re facing the other way” thing you have to do that made me fail it repeatedly.
That was probably the closest I got to disliking the game.
Whoa, someone else who played Stardust! The lack of air control was fine there, because it was basically a turn-based game, but I think you actually did have to turn around fast on some levels there — I forget the exact situation, but I think you could land on a crumbly block and turn around as soon as you hit it in order to vaporize a block diagonally down from you. It always bothered me a little, because it was almost the only time you had to use your reflexes in the game.
When I played Stardust I didn’t know what a puzzle platformer was.
Stardust for the mac, omg! My comment here is a simple re-parroting of what Matt said.
On chapter D at the moment.
The chapter that is missing seem to be linked to the Void levels you get randomly thrown into.
It seems to activate the Void levels, you need to do somoething out of the ordinary, like I accidentaly used the grappling hook on a wall and fell down a pit before the concept of the grappling hook was introduced in the game.
Or it could be totally random or another invisible switch and that was just coincidence.
err, I meant Void Rim levels.
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