Lowglow Is A Beautiful Audiovisual Puzzle Delight
How low can you glow?
Lowglow [official site] is a hypnotising sensory delight. It looks beautiful, sounds beautiful and does a remarkable job of simultaneously teasing, goading, and soothing me via its steadily challenging puzzles. Come look for yourself:
The premise is simple: you guide glowing orbs from a Lemmings-like entry hole on one side of the screen, to a goal at the other. In order to steer your balls of light towards home, you're charged with laying, dragging and angling lines which act as springboards, setting them off in whichever direction you choose. Unlike Lemmings, there's no limit to how many orbs you waste, so long as you eventually set the right path in each level of which there are loads. You must judge trajectory, inertia, gravity and physics and before all of that begins to boil your brain and has you climbing the walls, the lovely sounds that beam from each orb as they ricochet off your pathway or the surrounding level exterior instantly brings you back down.
Where it gets tricky, then, is in the game's later levels. Later levels add more orbs which behave in different ways. They add different surfaces: some more bouyant, some that dissolve orbs completely. Later levels add black holes, laser traps and pits of endless blackness. Later levels suck, until you beat them and then they're not so bad after all.
There's a story too which, although superficial at best, adds context to progression and sees you hanging about with god-esque, Santa Claus lookalike, hipster beard-donning dudes who I'd like to take for a beer in real life. If you like what you see (and hear), Lowglow can be picked up on Steam for the discounted price of £4.75. An editor is "coming soon" say devs Rockodile.