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.
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.