Fill ’er up

Today I spent about 40 minutes with Linelith, a game by Patrick Traynor, creator of Patrick’s Parabox. Linelith came out a few years ago, almost immediately after Patrick’s Parabox, but somehow flew under my radar. Having played it now, I decided to follow Patrick on Steam so as not to miss another of his games.

Linelith starts with very little in the way of tutorial: The letters WASD and the image of a moving mouse cursor are all that is shown to you, and the rest is left to experimentation. The HUD consists only of a single progress bar that goes to 132. What resulted was a bite-size TUNIC-ish experience which left me with the mental “oh… oh! … OH!” of realizing the repercussions of what Linelith taught me.

The concept of the game is very simple, and yet I struggle to describe it without giving away some of the excitement of discovery. In an effort to avoid spoiling, I’ll describe the first puzzle: Drag the mouse across four blocks to draw a line. Once you’ve finished the game, you’ll see that even that description is not the whole story and partially a lie.

The puzzles start out extremely easy, and though they do increase in difficulty, they never get so hard as to really stump me for more than a minute. In the end, I was never bored, never frustrated, and frequently thrilled. It’s three bucks on Steam right now, and well worth it.