Hear me out: this is the best puzzle game of all time

Ok not really. But it is way better than I was expecting. I'm not really exaggerating though - there were times where I felt like it was the best puzzle game of all time. Some of these individual puzzles are blindingly creative and the way all the mechanics work together is incredibly well thought out and fun to decipher.

Heavily inspired by The Witness and Antichamber, but I really wish it was more of the former and less of the latter. I don't think the non-Euclidean layout adds anything to the game and serves only to frustrate the player. It doesn't work with the word puzzles in most cases and just makes it difficult to navigate.

My other big complaint is that your objective is kind of unclear the whole time. You basically spend your entire playthrough running around aimlessly in search of new areas and puzzles, which isn't the worst thing ever, but it's a little worse than if I knew what I was working towards. Compare the lasers/mountain from The Witness; there's nothing like that here, not that clear anyway.

But I seriously can't stress enough how good the puzzles in this are. The extremely simple clue/answer word puzzle format is pushed to its absolute limits and I'm genuinely in awe of the creativity on display. I haven't even really dug into level 2 (a post-release expansion that stands alone from the original game, but is included in it), but what I've seen of it has been very clever as well. I want to try out the community maps too.

If you like puzzles, I really strongly recommend this game. If you liked The Witness, I recommend it even more (but don't expect something quite that good).

I have never played a game with so many google tabs open and sticky notes on my desk oh my Lord. Don't go into this game unprepared.

Lingo was alright. Another classic case of "puzzle game that starts chill and fun and ends up completely unhinged and insane by the end". I was able to solve a lot by myself, but some of those puzzles near the end I don't get the logic AT ALL on how some of those puzzles are solvable. Shoutout to the like three YouTubers who have went through this game and uploaded their footage online, y'all are the real heroes.

Maybe I'll come back to this and clean up achievements some day, but for now I'm happy to mark it as done.

DISCLAIMER:
This review is entirely for my own sake. You are welcome to read it but it may or may not contain spoilers for the whole game.

NOTE: The time played is the one recorded at time of review and it includes all main levels and a few custom maps (which may or may not have taken longer)

Have you ever vibed with a game as soon as you started it? I hadn't felt like this with a game since The Witness, and yet this time it might have been even stronger.
From the non-euclidian environment (aka being teleported all over the place and having to create a mental map of connections and shortcuts), through the rule discovery segments (which take place all throughout the whole game and not just at the beginning since you keep learning more rules and finding new puzzle elements even in the "post-game"), to the puzzles themselves (which always felt creative and fresh, even if sometimes too easy and other times unfairly difficult) I loved every second of it.
Imagine my surprise when while doing clean-up I find out there's a Level 2 that is even bigger than the first. And then there are more smaller official levels and once I'm done with those I keep wanting more and more, so I do what I never do. I turn to community content, and it's actually good?
I can't get this game out of my head. I was waiting to finally be done with it before writing a review, but it just wasn't happening and I had to get some of these thoughs on paper before I exploded.

Overall, I can't recommend this game enough for puzzle fans. I'll be singing its praise for years to come.

I do love a puzzle game all about learning rules through doing, rather than having thins spelled out to you, and Lingo fulfills the brief for this very well. It's all about words and the (mainly) cubes you have to fill in have a bunch of different rules attached to them based on pretty much everything about them.

Some of the puzzles are a bit hit or miss, either with multiple solutions or answers that don't quite fit the rule but I suppose that's kind of to be expected with around 2000+ puzzles across multiple levels. Generally it's a good time, and presented a number of Eureka moments when away from the game.

The game does have a big downside though and that's the map. Portals I can deal with, non-Euclidean geometry I cannot - too many times you're thrown around in circles or ending up back where you started just from a little exploration, and for me brought about a very uneasy nausea. It's worse in some levels than others (and there's one at the very end that I immediately noped out of) but it left such a sour note as even with basic colour blocks and cubes, I think it would have been a fun map to just be able to explore normally.

Coming off the heels of games like The Witness and Antichamber, Lingo is probably the best iteration of this "Explore Esoteric Spaces at Your Leisure and Solve Esoteric Puzzles" subgenre. But rather than say this as a mark of high praise, it leaves me questioning whether this formula is even worth pursuing.

Several hallmarks of the genre that appear in Lingo feel unnecessarily obtuse. To give one example, why are these games so fascinated with the idea of forgoing explicit directions? An ill defined rule set allows for the highly fetishized "eureka" moment, but it also creates way too much doubt in the player once puzzles begin to scale up in difficulty. In some ways this works in the favor of the developer who can play fast and loose with the internal logic of certain puzzles because the rules were never set in the first place. Someone whom this never benefits is the player, as they are often reduced to feeling their way around in the dark.

This approach essentially sells out the credibility of the late game in favor of a more "immersive" early game. Perhaps this isn't a bad business decision, as the percentage of the puzzle genre player base that even reaches the late game self-selects for smarter, more forgiving, and more enfranchised players. Regardless, it's bad design propped up by those that feed on the obtuse.

Esoteric, at times non-euclidean, environments are another hackneyed cliche of the genre that really need to go. Throughout my run of Lingo all I could think was "How does this level design add to the game?". The player spends the vast majority of their time navigating samey white hallways that bend physical space to create a layer of confusion. In an exploration focused game with more tools to aid in that exploration, this could be fun. In Lingo, however, it mostly amounts to running around aimlessly trying to remember where a certain wall panel is. It's somewhat amazing that the game manages to take something fundamentally alien to our existence, non-euclidean space, and make it simultaneously boring and tedious.

This is to say nothing of the cumulative effect it has on the player's mental load. Puzzle games are demanding; the puzzles in Lingo are demanding. It takes a lot of focus to play this game. Adding the mental stress of remembering and navigating intentionally vague, confusing environments that ask rote memorization of the player more than any amount of cleverness pushes the game to a real breaking point. Lingo is very frustrating to play at times, and every element of its design reinforces that.

It's amazing, then, that Lingo is a frustrating experience even when the player knows how to solve the puzzles.

Often, very often, the player will be staring at a puzzle with a complete understanding of it. They know the logic of the puzzle, how to transform the word in front of them. The only problem is that the English language is vast, and many word games have many possible solutions. Thus the player will sit there guessing solution after solution, all of which should work, until they find the one that the developer chose arbitrarily.

"Uncertainty" is the eleven letter word that solves this puzzle: Lingo is absolutely plagued by it. From the exploration, to the objective of the game, to the puzzles you don't know how to solve, to the puzzles you do know how to solve, the player is always left uncertain about their actions. There is some fun to be had if one enjoys puzzle games, but ultimately the juice isn't worth the long, aimless, foggy squeeze.