Recent reviews by brymith

The mechanic is interesting and in most of the levels its application is pretty clever, but I wish that the game had been a bit longer so that it could have been explored some more; it has a ton of potential and I would hate to see it end here.

I'm a sucker for time trials so for me that is easily the most enjoyable part of the game. The trials, while a bit obscure, offer a lot of replayability, even beyond the medals. Starting up the game and seeing that someone beat your time by a ridiculously large margin affords an opportunity to revisit that level and try to approach it a different way. Bigger titles would have their shortcuts and "exploits" patched out shortly after they're discovered, but I think that A Divided Light would benefit from a different approach:

Leave them in. Embrace them, even.

I realize I'm a bit biased here since, at the time of this writing, I currently hold first place for all 20 levels, but hear me out. Speed-running is a huge scene with a lot of fans, and finding all the quirky little shortcuts in a game is really fun. I praised the cleverness of most puzzles above, but players will feel all the more clever for discovering there are corners they can toss orbs around, whole sections they can skip with a well-timed jump. While I'm sure that wasn't necessarily intentional, I don't really see that as bad design. There's a right way to do the puzzle that is cool and interesting, and there's a wrong way that is clever and fun. There's finishing the game and then there's beating it. The puzzles will require some thought for sure, but the time trials and the leaderboards will require even more, and I think that's great.

tl;dr: I like this game and I hope to see more.