Release on 29th May, this is a Puzzle point-and-click game, despite what you might think this combo works quite nicely. This gorgeous puzzle-filled adventure successfully wraps you in a mystical world, where bright hues and cheerful melodies set the mood. But despite this beautiful exterior lies disjointed obstacles that can get pretty annoying.
A slow narrative tells a story about a lost civilization that once used magical stone creatures to build and maintain its structures. These beings, are called golems and they are practically extinct, save for one you're tasked to rebuild throughout ten puzzle-filled stages. Starting as a lifeless ball, the golem feels like a nuisance at first, which only serves to make its eventual evolution that much more gratifying.
The golem will be slowly pieced back together as the game goes on, new mechanics(golem's mechanics) are introduced to allow for more difficult puzzles. When it gains the ability to walk on its own, for example, you will have to accurately predict its movement while manipulating the environment to clear pathways at the right moments.
Golem's ten stages act as large puzzle rooms, each with the objective of going from one end to the other. And its made to be done with the actual golem's moveset. This can be as simple as moving a rock pillar to close a gap, or as complex as activating a series of switches to resuscitate an old, aging turbine that in turn spins up other nearby mechanisms. The goal always remains the same but with shifting tasks and complexity. The golem will sometimes be needed to be precisely placed to apply pressure to a switch, giving you access to a new area via a now moving railcar. In turn you might need to ensure that your ally has a clear path to the next hurdle. If you've gone one step too far without a clear solution in sight, backtracking and starting from scratch may be your only option. This can get specially annoying, the lack of polish on a couple of mid-to-late levels meant that the solutions were sometimes a little more frustrating than they could have been.
Going from one stage to another isn't a fast or free-flowing affair, but instead a point-and-click style, as said before. This systematic process and your character's slow movement speed is well compensated for with the fast-forward button, which you’ll probably use frequently(as I did). And just like the key items throughout each stage, walkable pathways are often indistinguishable from off-limits areas. There is also the inconsistency of Golem's visual language, that leads to efforts of just clicking on possible destinations in the hopes of finding one that's actually accessible.The camera also becomes the surprise antagonist by the end, and some minor keyboard gymnastics were needed to keep the camera from driving me completely mad.Golem's inconsistent puzzles and jarring difficulty spikes will sometimes annoy you. All though, I'm very happy with time and money spent on this game, and hope this encourages Longbow Games to try this style more often, though perhaps with a bit more polish next time. So, go on and check it out on Steam, it's already out and they are updating it frequently!
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