I love a good puzzle game! Portal is one of my favorites and a recent indie title, Six Sides of the World, has been one of the best this year. So another title has arrived and it took my interest. Anomaly 1729 aims to be visually retro, mysteriously natured, and “mind-bendingly” awesome, but will this satisfy the hard-core puzzler?
Anomaly 1729 is a mysterious being, I’ll give it that, as your journey takes you through a place that resembles the Tron version of the Sahara Desert. With your retro-looking companion Ano, you must explore and complete a series of challenges that revolve around manipulating the environment by rotating, flipping, or all sorts of other jazz. The concept is compelling and, with the world bending at your own will, it seems that this could be one hell of an awesome puzzle game. Sadly, Anomaly 1792 lacks depth and substance for a healthy design of interesting puzzles.
Anomaly 1729 is attempting to be the next Portal. Literally, it is. Your character shoots two different color projectiles: one blue, the other orange (oh really?). This allows for multiple ways of dynamic traversal in the game world. Sounds familiar, right? But it lacks much of the charm of Portal and, in fact, remains quite dull throughout. You can shoot your projectiles at certain interactive points that flip the game world, rotate it, or move certain objects back and forth. This makes up a majority of puzzles. It has a strong foundation but it is not executed well overall.
The majority of levels are needlessly massive and are too easy to get lost in. More often than not, the exit point isn’t clearly displayed, so you’ll mostly explore aimlessly through the world until you see the exit two-thirds of the way in. It’s like doing one of those maze maps as a kid but the exit pops up after you start drawing the line through the maze and you’re already halfway through it. It doesn’t help for the replay value as puzzles, for the most part, aren’t engaging or interesting enough to go back to. I was happy to see how most of the levels were traversable no matter what rotation/changes had taken place, but for the most part they just lack any interesting features. The overall puzzle is shallow and the thought process in progressing is often minimal. This is unlike Portal, where puzzles have a sense of character, multiple elements to make them interesting, and are focused to make sure you understand them.
The puzzles here aren’t exactly varied either. Again, whereas Portal brought in smaller items such as turrets, lasers, and movable objects and integrated them into bigger, more complex puzzles, Anomaly 1729 just repeats the same formula again and again, with progression only adding very few new elements together. It lacks challenge. It only really makes the rooms bigger and this can make the game more confusing to traverse through; it just becomes tedious. Also, the game does a rather tiresome trick to make sure you play longer by making exits only open when the room is in a certain rotation. I can understand why but, at the same time, the game world provides no hints or guides to show you what rotation the room should be and, really, it just feels like a rather lazy way for you to put more effort in when you can complete a puzzle without much of it.
There is a story in the sense of a vague plot that revolves around Ano. Cryptic texts appear and, with each section completed, you gather code to decipher the cryptic text as the game progresses. This is a great idea, but this does not help out until halfway through the game when you’ve gathered a great deal of code. From the starting point, you will be left confused and, after a while, not very much will be known or explained well to the player. It’s sloppy execution that, in better hands, could be an engaging narrative, but in the first hour or so you have no idea what’s happening and, by the time you’ve deciphered the cryptic texts, you just don’t care and have already missed too much.
While the controls are fairly comfortable, the aspects of rotating the world often leads to some glitches and bugs that ruin some of the puzzles. There were times I rotated larger rooms and, while on a platform that allowed me to move with the room, I moved through walls and other times didn’t. There seemed to be some issues with logic or just plain old glitches at work. I also found out that Ano is rather good at floating and with well-timed movements in the right place, you could skip large chunks of the puzzles or even reach the end in smaller ones.
That’s the main issue here: it lacks challenge. It can be too easy to complete. I admit, I’m good at puzzle games (not meaning to sound too big-headed), and this did not give me any sense of hardship, later thinking, or reward, which is something that Portal offers. I keep mentioning Portal and I do so because this game wants to be that. Well, there was something else that made Portal great – the writing. Its humor and interesting backstory kept you invested and interested in the game world you explored. But here, it looks pretty but after a while, it’s just bland and uninteresting. It’s a big mystery as the game’s dialogue or text is cryptic, yet you don’t care as you hardly understand anything as the game progresses, and thus you’re unwilling to just invest or immerse yourself in it.
Anomaly 1729 could have been bold, daring and a dynamic puzzler. But it’s repetitive, dull and unchallenging while just feeling a tad bit lazy. The idea is great, but the game just doesn’t feel developed enough to make you invested in it, nor is it compelling enough to enjoy.