Parallax

I’m guessing Parallax would have looked really spiffy using Oculus Rift. I figured that’s what it was designed for. I was wrong. The developers just wanted to make a visually striking first-person maze-puzzler that didn’t suck. Mission accomplished there. The concept is a fairly basic “find your way to the goal by opening the pathway to it” style puzzling. I’ve never found this style of puzzle to be particularly challenging. It’s just a matter of reverse-engineering. It’s still satisfying, I suppose in the same way not getting stuck in a hedge maze and starving to death or being featured on Fox’s Most Embarrassing Rescues: Caught on Tape is. She said wearing her “As Seen on Fox’s Most Embarrassing Rescues: Caught on Tape” tee-shirt. Hey, don’t judge! I got separated from my parents, got scared, and started to cry. It’s not nice to mock either. It was a long time ago. Okay, fine, it was three weeks ago. But I’ve grown up a lot since then.

I kept waiting to be attacked by the White or Black Spy. It never happened. That makes me so Mad.

Parallax’s biggest problem is it stays basic too long. Which benefited me for reasons I’ll get into later, but everyone else will experience a game that only scrapes its potential. The game feels too tutorialish, willing to try to bend brains but only in baby steps. There’s two scaling problems common on the indie scene in games that don’t attempt to be punishers. The first is the Sine Curve Problem. This is where the difficulty feels stop-and-go (see Thomas Was Alone). The second is the Lazy Slope Problem. This is where the difficulty does technically scale properly, but does so in such a slow matter that the game risks getting boring. Parallax suffers from this. When it brings out more challenging or novel play mechanics, such as timing puzzles or especially anti-gravity stages, stuff that the game should have been based around from the start, you’re already sort of tired of the whole concept.

I should point out that this isn’t a problem if you play the game the way I used to play puzzles games before I started IGC. I would knock out a couple of puzzles and then quit for the day before I burned myself out. Puzzlers can be exhausting, especially when their visual stimuli is kept to a minimum. I like playing games like Parallax. I dislike reviewing them, because I have to sort of plow through them as fast as possible so that I can move on to my next review. I don’t think logic puzzles like these lend themselves to an all-day play session. Not in the same way that, say, Portal does. Stuff like Parallax is more in line with the daily crossword puzzle in a newspaper. I like doing those, but I wouldn’t want to sit around all day doing them. It would get boring quickly.

Unfortunately, for me at least, I was spared from doing that with Parallax for the worst reason. Although epilepsy is an every-present issue in my gaming life, motion sickness has always been a rarity for me. For whatever reason, Parallax left me folding over my chair, feeling like I was about to toss my cookies all over the floor. The last time this happened to me was Marathon on Xbox Live Arcade, so it’s been a while. And this is before stages with gravity tricks and pathways that feel like the loops on a roller coaster. That was the first time in my indie gaming life I had to literally put the controller down to avoid caking it in my own vomit. Results won’t be typical, but be warned, if you’re prone to motion sickness, you might want to avoid Parallax. I normally am not, and this one got me. In fairness, I’ve heard no complaints elsewhere.

I call this the “I didn’t like having working eyeballs anyway” color scheme.

Parallax doesn’t really do anything bad, so it’s sort of hard to critique beyond the opening stages lacking the best (or in my case, most stomach-churning) aspects of the game. I liked it. I’m just sort of over the whole two-tone visual thing. It was cool at one point. It’s been done to death and it’s exhausting to the point of sucking fun out of the experience now. But, Parallax is a solid puzzler. If you’re looking for a decent first-first brain bender, give it a shot. I mean, I can’t anymore unless I want to puke all over the place. Note to self: don’t play this before meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister.

Parallax was developed by Toasty Games
Point of Sale: Steam

$9.99 frequently walked off the ledges while playing, which actually does sound semi-common when playing the game in the making of this review. Not a deal breaker. There’s no consequence for it.

Parallax is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard