SFTW: Closure
Iain Simons selects another game so you can while away a few hours. This week it's Closure. Enjoy wi
By Iain Simons Published 06 February 2009From Tyler Glaiel the co-creator of Aether comes a new work that surely represents a new high-watermark in browser based gaming. Closure is both a vivid meditation on sickness and the mental states it produces *and* an inventive 2d platform puzzle.
It's all about illumination. Each level requires your character to find and then enter a single door, leading to the next. The challenge lies in finding your pathway in the darkness. If a surface isn't lit, then for the purposes of the game it doesn't exist; the puzzles are thus created from the strategic arrangement of orbs of light around the environment, each glowing a finite radius.
The rough art design of the piece lends it an intimate, hand-drawn feeling which amplifies the discomfort at its centre. It's reminiscent of a lino-illustration, with the action feeling scratched into the screen rather than drawn.
You shouldn't take any of this however to mean that the game isn't an engaging and fun challenge, it really is. What's remarkable is that Closure manages to sustain its 'gameness' whilst illustrating as much as any title yet the potential that the form has to express something more interesting. Get illuminated.
Play Closure.
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