Online game parodies are sometimes ropey, being neither humorous nor enjoyable to play. I’m delighted that The Looker is each, and free too. It is a loving send-up of The Witness, inviting us to an odd island to resolve extra line-drawing puzzles and hearken to extra audio tapes. A few of the puzzles are fairly intelligent, and lots of the jokes made me chortle—plus it is solely an hour or two to finish.
Truthfully, do not watch this trailer, okay. Simply skip down except you actually need convincing, during which case you are solely spoiling your personal enjoyable.
The Looker has us fixing puzzles by drawing traces between begin and finish factors. They begin so simple as the maze puzzles on a restaurant’s children exercise sheet then develop extra advanced. Like in J.Blo’s Puzzle Island, some puzzles require wanting on the atmosphere in new methods and from new views. Some are humorous and others I’ve been genuinely happy to resolve (aside from one which, I think, solely required trial-and-error as a result of I wasn’t paying sufficient consideration to an earlier puzzle educating me the answer). One small phrase of warning: one puzzle is predicated round sound, although I suppose you can brute-force it.
Additionally, it is humorous. I am being obscure as a result of a part of the enjoyable is seeing what The Looker does with the foundations of The Witness, however many jokes play with expectations, or are surprises, or come from realisations. Others come extra straightforwardly in audio logs with daft riffs on Gravity’s Rainbow, Invisible Cities, philosophy, and poetry colliding into foolishness. I laughed at many jokes! Aloud! I realise that is what jokes are for, however so few online game parodies are literally humorous.
You possibly can obtain The Looker absolutely free from Steam. It is made by Bradley Lovell, aka Subcreation Studio. In case you’ve performed it and are inquisitive about among the tech works, Lovell has defined extra on his web site.
In our glowing The Witness evaluation, Richard Moss mentioned it is “really fairly good, should you can ignore its layer of self-satisfied philosophical grandiosity”. We declared it considered one of our favourites video games of 2016 too.
I simply remembered one puzzle joke and began laughing once more. Good job, The Looker.