Filament-ary, My Dear Watson

Over the past week I've been playing a game that came out on Friday called Filament, and while I don't usually talk about my gaming hobby that much here on my blog, I have to write a glowing review of this game. It's a puzzle game with a very simple premise: you play a spacefaring traveler who comes upon a spaceship whose crew has disappeared, except for a disembodied voice over the radio from the pilot who's trapped in the cockpit. You wander about the rest of the ship and find “anchors,” where you control a little robot who can spool out an infinite amount of cable after itself in little puzzle rooms. They're explained as you “decrypting” the ship's logs to figure out what happened, and to progress you have to use the robots to wind cable around pegs in such a way that you've touched every one at least once in order to progress. However, you can never cross the cable you've already laid down, and those two simple rules combine to make a wide variety of puzzles from easy to brain-breakingly difficult.

The art style is also perfectly matched to my likes, very stylized and clean.

It's a very simple premise, but there are all kinds of additional obstacles added in various puzzles: sometimes literal obstacles, which block your path and force you think more outside the box, sometime more interesting puzzle conditions, like needing to have wrapped some pegs before being able to wrap others, having multiple robots (with multiple cables) in one room, or needing to run the cable over pads on the floor as well. The whole thing has strong connections to the mathematical fields of topology and graph theory; I often find myself, while stumped by a fiendishly difficult puzzle, thinking: “Surely there much be some theorem in topology to help me winnow out the impossible options here and narrow it down to the correct sequence of wraps to make to finish this level!”

Here I am in the library, trying to decipher what looks like a binary code on these servers.

Make no mistake, these puzzles get hard, and I am absolutely loving the experience. The story you unlock bit by bit is very engrossing, and keeps me coming back to throw myself at particularly difficult puzzles over and over again in hopes of finding out more about what happened. (I haven't finished the game yet, actually, so please no spoilers! I normally don't care about them but I find myself caring very much with this game for some reason—perhaps because the scraps of knowledge are so precious for having been so hard-won.) Here's a shot of a puzzle I've been stuck on for probably at least 20 minutes now:

This puzzle variety also requires you to run the cable through the four “light screens” you can see here.

I can't neglect to mention the music, which makes a soft, quiet, meditative background to your brain sparking and shorting out. It's very soothing, and loops so well that I could listen to it for hours. (And have!) I bought the “Marmalade Edition” which came with the soundtrack, and am looking forward to listening to it the next time I paint. (It's named after a particular character in the game, who all have color-themed nicknames assigned.)

The game is set up so that you can wander around at will and try any of the available puzzles, which helps negate the feeling of being stuck and unable to progress which is all-too-easy for puzzle games to fall into. If I'm having trouble with a particular type of puzzle, I can go and try a bunch of other different types instead. Sometimes I'll come back to a puzzle a day or two later and find the solution suddenly coming to mind. In fact…

After firing up the game to get this screenshot, I figured it out in about five minutes!

All in all, I can highly recommend Filament if you want to give your brain a real workout. And not just the puzzles; there are also secrets scattered liberally throughout the spaceship, in ways that make them incredibly satisfying to find. I once picked up a tray of seedlings in the botany lab, and discovered a secret code encoded in the way the plants' leaves were pointing at each other. I found another in the contents of a vending machine, and another as a binary pattern hidden in sets of four lights being on and off. There's a lot going on in this game under the surface, but the pleasant background music and engaging story make me want to keep coming back for another round of being thoroughly, utterly stumped.