Lightmatter
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Developer Tunnel Vision Games
Publisher Aspyr
Format PC
Release Out now
Given you spend all your time in Lightmatter manipulating light and dark, it’s perhaps no surprise that developer Tunnel Vision is so comfortable in the long shadow cast by the game it’s clearly been inspired by. Everywhere you look, it’s there: firstperson puzzling that revolves around a sciencefiction MacGuffin and the mechanics it introduces, navigating a stark white laboratory, chamber by chamber, your only companion a disembodied voice making increasingly sinister jokes. By this point, we probably don’t need to actually speak its name, but for the sake of the record: Lightmatter is just about as pure a Portal- alike as we’ve ever played.
The game opens with you waking in a semi-ruined scientific facility after some kind of party turned sour, and encountering a shadowy figure who delivers instructions for your escape in clipped tones (provided by David Bateson, the actor better known as Agent 47). This is Virgil, CEO of Lightmatter Technologies, discoverer of a new form of light energy, and inventor of a perpetual-motion machine powered by it. Hence the party. But the science, as it is wont to do in these situations, went wrong – and somehow caused the shadows to turn feral.
Darkness in Lightmatter is a physical, liquid thing that oozes and ripples. Shadows form into literal pools, and stepping in one will see you immediately devoured by it. Luckily, though, the labs are littered with handy inventions that help keep the darkness at bay, beginning with some not-especially-sci-fi floor lamps. You can carry one lamp at a time, then place it down and move freely within its cone of light, but you can’t jump while carrying one. And there’s the rub – the lamps can’t pass over gaps, but you can – which forms the basis of almost all the game’s puzzles.
Even as you start to encounter new tools and obstacles, the problem is generally thus: you have two beacons, but three places that need light. It’s essentially that old riddle about the farmer trying to cross a river with a chicken and a fox, extrapolated into physical space. Out of these simple components, Lightmatter builds the very best kind of puzzles: the kind where trial-and-error is less useful than talking it through with yourself, preferably out loud, maybe using a few fingers.
When a solution does finally click, it’s something you can almost physically feel happening in your head. It’s exactly how we felt the first time we played Portal, and the firstperson puzzlers that followed afterwards, and it’s been a good while since we last played one. Tunnel Vision is more than comfortable in that shadow and, honestly, so are we.