As I approached the second hour of my time with Etherborn, I began to question if I actually had a brain, or that perhaps my mother had been sniffing glue while I was in the womb. I am not the sharpest tack in the toolbox as problem solving has never been my strength, but Etherborn messed with my mind so much that I was on the verge of applying to go back to school.
Developed by Altered Matter, Etherborn is a puzzle game that doesn’t offer simple solutions. I have never played anything quite like it, its unique spin on gravity-shifting doing enough to trump me whenever I though I had it clocked.
You play as a voiceless body on a quest to find meaning, much in the same way that you will endeavour to find your IQ while traversing Etherborn’s lo-fi but stunning levels. From the PC demo I played, I didn’t gather too much about the overall plot or pick up anything about how it might progress, but considering it’s inspired by M.C. Escher, perhaps it’s an experience that you find the depth in yourself, its messages personal to the player.
Prior to developing the stages, the developers would sit down with Lego pieces to figure out exactly how they should work. It shows with each level feeling like the most harrowing of Rubik’s Cubes, the perspective shifting to and fro to constantly keep you on-guard.
It’s difficult to explain how navigation works in Etherborn; it’s something that you really have to play to gauge an understanding of. Your character can travel on flat surfaces with platforming staples like ledge jumps included, but Etherborn is more about falling with purpose than it is getting precise leaps.
When you approach a ledge, the circular highlight under your character will expand to give you an approximation of where you will land. It starts off simply enough with the intro stages misleading you into thinking that you have it all figured out, but when the game shows its real hand, you will find yourself becoming disorientated and lost but still eager to progress. You won’t need tracing paper a la The Witness, but you will need to sit back and properly consider your next move often.
Your character can climb up and down walls with a smooth edge, almost like a ramp of sort, that are usually the go-to to find if you become befuddled. From these, you can reach new areas or fall off them to land elsewhere and unravel more of the conundrum.
When Etherborn’s first real challenge makes itself known, however, you will have to forget everything it’s taught you. You can pick up “spheres” which can be placed on certain surfaces to open up new possibilities with the aforementioned challenge asking you to collect more than a handful. Embarrassingly, it never occurred to me that you could then take these back and use them elsewhere, which could have saved about an hour of self-motivational speeches.
I will be interested to see how Etherborn fulfils its potential when it lands on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One sometime later this year. I better start stockpiling vitamin B ahead of time, then.
Altered Matter is currently crowdfunding Eherborn on Fig for the last stages of the game’s development. You can check it out here.
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