There were a bunch of excellent-looking puzzle games revealed at this week’s Thinky Direct, including a new mystery game from one of the designers of the Case of the Golden Idol, and a time-loop based “Metroidbrainia” (a portmanteau that caused me physical pain) which swaps out tool-gathering for puzzle-solving. The game that really stood out to me, however, was He Who Watches, a gravity-defying “dungeon puzzler” that’s most easily summarised as Legend of Grimrock meets Portal.
He Who Watches takes the trappings of the classic dungeon crawlers of yore, with you playing an adventurer armed with a bow and arrow, exploring a labyrinthine underground maze using classic tile-based movement. But it replaces the RPG elements of traditional dungeon crawlers with 3D spatial puzzling. So instead of shooting your bow at monsters, you’ll shoot it at switches to open doors, and at 3D blocks to pull them around on a magical chain.
There are two key elements to He Who Watches’ puzzling. The first is you only have one arrow, which you can recall at any time. The second is that your character can walk on walls and ceilings. Since you can only shoot your arrow directly ahead of you, this means you often need to manoeuvre yourself into specific positions to progress. If there’s a button on the floor you need to shoot, for example, you’ll have to find a way onto the adjacent wall in order to hit it.
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At a more advanced level, you’ll also use your sticky boots to manipulate other objects, such as shifting blocks around to insert them into holes or stack them atop one another. The newly released trailer does a great job of showing off the spatial ingenuity of the puzzling. But it also made me want to barf a bit. All the speedy flipping around of the camera set off my motion-sickness instantaneously, and I was concerned about whether that would also be the case in the game.
Fortunately, there’s also a demo available, so I downloaded that to see how the game affected me in play. And thankfully, He Who Watches is far less nausea-inducing when you’re in direct control. It also makes you feel immensely clever in that mind-expanding Portal fashion. Even the basic puzzles are deeply satisfying to feel out, and it has a pleasant difficulty curve that smoothly introduces you to all the tools.
Anyway, it immediately shot up my list of most anticipated games for the year. There’s no firm release date for He Who Watches yet, but the trailer confirms that it will launch sometime in the autumn.
