
	Platform PC Genre Puzzle Publisher Doctor Entertainment Developer Doctor Entertainment Released Summer 2010
Newsletter
Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly. Enter E-Mail Address Below: Subscribe \| Unsubscribe

Indie Game Review – Puzzle Dimension

Puzzle games are possibly the most useful genre in electronic entertainment today. Pattern recognition, spatial relationships, physics, logic, a good puzzle game can incorporate these elements without really making it obvious. Moreover, a good puzzle game has a simple objective, not necessarily an easy objective. When putting together their first title, Puzzle Dimension, the folks at Doctor Entertainment clearly kept these tenets in mind and have turned out a wonderful little puzzler that will bake your noodle quite nicely.

Puzzle Dimension looks absolutely gorgeous. When starting a level, the various tiles and components of the puzzle have a deliberate pixelated 8-bit feel to them that changes into elegantly textured and animated pieces when your marble avatar gets close or rolls over them. Special effects like fire are excellently done. The animation for the marble and various mechanical traps and triggers in the game are butter smooth. The backgrounds are subtle, but they really make the puzzle fields pop. Hands down, this is the best looking indie game I have ever seen.

Advertisement

On the audio front, the game's music and sound effects are the right mix of strong and subtle. The music shifts depending on how fast you're moving and how well you're doing on the current puzzle, moving from 8-bit melodies to high fidelity symphonics and back again so smoothly, you barely notice the change. From the rumble of fires igniting to the snap of spikes coming up into

Advertisement

place, the sound effects are crisp and help accentuate the gameplay. Everything fits together and works together effortlessly in the sound department.

Gameplay has that “easy to learn, hard to master” feel that any really good game holds. The basic objective is always the same: gather all the sunflowers on the board by rolling your marble avatar over them, then exit the field. On a lot of those puzzle fields, that goal is often easier said than done. Teleporters, switchable tiles, spike traps, flame traps, sheets of ice, and other hazards wait for the unwary player to screw up. Some maps are easy. Some are brain bendingly hard. The nice thing is that if one puzzle is crushing your mind, you can try a different one in the same cluster. Gather enough sunflowers and you'll open up new clusters as well as new visual themes for the maps. While getting score multipliers for fast play or for “de-pixelizing” areas of a puzzle map are nice, it's the challenge of the puzzles that will keep players coming back for more.

For anybody who loves puzzle games, Puzzle Dimension should be a required part of your library. It's a piece of gaming goodness that is damned near flawless. I can't wait to see what Doctor Entertainment comes up with next.

Axel Cushing

August 19, 2010