Filament

This game was reviewed on PC.

Thank you to the mysterious video game gods as I got sent a review code for Filament and well the world got real and I honestly didn't touch my PC in over two weeks. So what is Filament? Well, that's what I thought to myself actually. So with one day off to write this let's settle down and get started.

So Filament is a story-based puzzle game set in space, yeah I was kinda shocked when I started the game up. In Filament, you arrive at the Alabaster, one of the flagship research vessels of the Filament Corporation. You find the ship is orbiting a mysterious planet and with no signs of the crew. So the first thing is to find out what's going on and to discover many of its secrets.

Right at the start, you are introduced to the only human presence left on the ship, Juniper, and she will talk to you throughout as you investigate what's going on. She was the navigator and is crucial to aid you on this epic quest.

Filament is a puzzle game each set of puzzles are set across stations through the whole ship. Within these puzzles, you control a bulb attached to a cable and you must navigate your way through and around blocks like totems to unlock the door and onto the next puzzle. At the start, these puzzles are very easy to get you into the game and to teach you what you need to be doing to move forward.

Each of the stations has five puzzles that you need to complete, what you need to do is take your cable and make contact with each totem of the corresponding colour. At the beginning of the game, you only need to worry about white lights but as you progress through the puzzles the game introduces other challenges into the mix. These include walls, doors, activating certain totems in the correct order in order to get all the lights on and move to the next puzzle.

As the early puzzles are very simple well even I managed to do these without many mistakes, but you then get to explore the ship at your leisure then you can take on any station you wish but for the love of god you need to plan these out as the difficulty of these stations massively increase as you get deeper into the ship.

When the difficulty increases so do the puzzles' complexity, where it used to be just white now you have to deal with multiple colours of light and believe me some of these are very trial and error. But because of this when you finally manage to overcome you do get a great feeling of accomplishment and its very rewarding.

Now I'll be honest and say I'm not the biggest puzzle game fan but I have to say this game is almost flawless the puzzles are very one more go variety and graphically the game is truly stunning the lighting is great the attention to detail it top notch and the environment is filled with posters, signs bits of personal belongings from the now gone crew. It's a game that looks great in a simple design but everything fits together perfectly.

The games' music fits amazingly well with a very peaceful melody that plays in the background, then the electronic sound when you correctly light up the totem as you are solving the puzzles so you just know you are on the right track to complete that puzzle.

It looks good, sounds good and plays great but this game isn't for the impatient as you need time to work out some of the more complex puzzles within the game and this can take loads of attempts until finally something just clicks and you get past that puzzle. So this for me is the best indie game I've played in many a year and if you enjoy puzzle games I'd recommend this high on the must-play list.

David Cameron