Red Copper Wire

Nimbus might have passed you by, with the avalanche of Steam sales blotting out the sun. It describes itself as a unique combination of racing and puzzling, which is technically not a lie, but it’s more like sitting down by yourself with a Rubik’s cube, timing how long it takes you to solve it, then looking up the world record on the internet to see how you did.

Essentially, you play a small rocket that's constantly falling downwards. You can only control which direction you're going in, and you can slow down, but you have no way to directly increase your velocity. You can only do so by either falling further, or using one of the assorted speed pads, squares, and other various elements.

The thing is, there aren’t any opponents. When you finish each level, it gives you a ranking, and shows how quickly other people beat it, so in a very loose sense you could imagine you’re competing against people, but they have no physical presence within the game’s world. Any choices you make or actions you perform have no direct consequence on what they’re doing. Take Mario Kart. Yes, I’m still trying to end up with a better time than everybody else, but they’re also right there next to me. Not only is there the visual motivation of “oh no bowser’s right behind me what do” but because they have a presence, what I’m doing effects what they’re doing. I can throw a turtle shell at that guy, I can ram that guy off the road, I can drive in front of this guy so he can’t get past; I have a thousand more verbs at my disposal.

Those verbs are important to the core of a racing game. I don’t think I’ve ever played a single match of any of them where both me and my opponent have just driven forwards in a straight line and never interacted with one another in any way at all. Even with computer players, there’s still a distinct degree of interaction.

So as a racing game, Nimbus falls down hard. I think I would have been interested to see how it would have been different if they had have dropped that pretence and focused entirely on the puzzle aspect, because the mechanic here is a good one. The constant falling is interesting, if nothing we haven’t seen before in smaller doses.

A lot of the puzzles are clever, and the game does use the mechanics in interesting ways. Eventually you have to push balls around, teleporters come into play, and some other fun props, but it still doesn’t sit quite right with me. For one, you can die. Death is very hard to work into a puzzle game properly. Say there’s a puzzle that takes about six minutes to complete. Well, if there’s a pitfall at the very end, then I might end up having to play through the first five and a half minutes over and over again for, really, no reason at all. I’ve already done that, I’ve already figured out what I’m supposed to do, and making me do it repeatedly isn’t good design.

Take SpaceChem. SpaceChem is brilliant. I’ve been playing it like mad. It’s a game where you get certain elements appearing on the left of the screen, and you have to manipulate them to result in different combinations of those elements on the right side of the screen. Which is interesting enough on its own, but where it gets brilliant is that a lot of the maps have chains. Each of those screens links directly to the next, so what you’re putting out of screen one gets put into screen two and so on. Of course, because your solutions are so long and horribly messy, you end up making your own problems half of the time and the mountain of shit you’re dealing with at screen six is almost certainly going to be entirely different to another player.

If, at the end of one of my solutions in SpaceChem, I suddenly died, and the game erased all of my progress and threw me right back to the start of the level, well, that’d hardly be satisfying, would it? So why is it a-okay in something like Nimbus to do more or less the same thing? What does death achieve in this game? What is it telling me as a player? It’s telling me I did something wrong, that I failed. Failure is fine. In a puzzle solving game, the whole point is finding an answer to a problem, so it’s necessary to tell me when I haven’t done that, but is death the only way to achieve this?

Honestly, shouldn’t it be self evident whether or not I’ve solved a puzzle? If the problem is getting from point A to point B in a specific way, then once I’m at point B isn’t that communicating it effectively already? Again, take SpaceChem. The puzzle is getting elements X and Y and combining them into XY, so once I’ve figured out how to do that, isn’t that enough? Why should the execution of that solution have a possibility of failure – let alone invalidate all of my previous efforts?

I’m not saying death should be entirely done away with in every game forever; obviously that would be ridiculous, but sometimes it just doesn’t fit in properly. Not to mention that the whole tone of Nimbus is a very relaxing, soothing one. The smooth visuals, the pleasant sounds, the flowing motions of your ship, it’s all very calm and tranquil. Then, of course, once you’ve died twenty times in a row on that one goddamn spiky bit, all that hard work put into generating that tone gets chucked right out the window.

I think it was about two or three dollars when I picked it up and it was certainly worth the price. As I said, there really are some genuinely clever puzzles, and the mechanics are interesting, but it definitely falls short of the mark in more than a few places.