Lumote‘s sound, art and puzzle design are excellent from beginning to end, and if that end shows up a little more quickly than I’d have wished then that just means it never wore thin in its six-hour runtime. And after it’s over there’s always New Game+, which fills in the details as to exactly what’s going on in this self-contained little slice of environmental strangeness.

I’m a fair way into its puzzles, but have an awfully long way to go. As the complexity increases, the need for calm, careful exploration of each new section’s possibilities becomes more pronounced. It can look overwhelming at first, until I methodically break it down, start pulling at threads. And then when it all works, I feel frankly magnificent.