This IGF winner will take you on a haunting journey consisting of devious puzzles. It's also very very hard.
Haunting Atmospherics: Stark visuals and ghostly sound accompany the narrative context
Innovative: Puzzles and gameplay are quite unique
Very Difficult: Despite endless trial and error, some puzzles are crazy hard
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Closure took the award for Best Audio in last year's IGF, as well as nominations in Technical Excellence and the Nuovo Award. Unlike Limbo, a game initially comparative in some ways, however, Closure is a straightforward puzzle game, with modest platforming as a gameplay feature. And as puzzle game and experience, Closure is a mind-bending and wonderful game. It's severe difficulty, however, will likely put all but the most avid off.
Emerging from a flaming car crash in the middle of the night, you're initial journey into the puzzles that await will do a solid job of teaching you the principles of the basic gameplay. Simply put, you can only stand (walk, jump, etc.) on illuminated sections of any level, lumination eminating from orbs of light which you can pick up and take with you. Any part of the screen that is black, or not illuminated, will result in a fall which restarts you at the beginning of that level. Each level will require you reach a door on the far side and enter it to access the next level, thus each puzzle revolves around moving orbs such that you can traverse the space between, grab necessary keys to unlock the door, and make your way forward.
Gritty visuals, flickering lights, and a ghostly soundtrack do a lot to fill in Closure with a sense of death. Given that this journey involves death intimately (as the first scene underscores), it's easy to see how IGF picked it's Audio winner. So much so that the heavy foreboding will weigh upon you throughout your play, though the visual cues throughout the game also do much to give you a sense of place amid the haunted corridors. Walking with an orb to illuminate a familiar object in the dark and eerie shadows is a treat, though the clues to what's happening to your character are held back with enough patience and confidence to allow the surprises a complete impact when they arrive.
If you ever make it that far, that is. Closure is an unbelievably hard game at times. It takes perseverance and endless trial and error, especially in later levels, to figure out how to proceed, many times because it appears there are so many ways. The last 1/3 of the levels of the game will easily take one longer to complete than the first 2/3rds of the game. Yet despite a solid ramp-up in difficulty, the closer you come to the end the more frustrating you'll find the play. And while much of the difficulty comes from the devious layouts, it's not entirely separate from difficulties in movement related to light. Often, you'll scoot up to an illuminated edge only to slide off into the darkness, which is due to difficulty in distinguishing where exactly is a safe place to leap from. This can be especially frustrating when you've spent some good time in a level already, and feels to the player like clearer visual cues would've been helpful in determining safe areas to avoid falling.
Yet despite the difficulty (especially if you're not shy about some helpful video guides online) Closure is a journey worth taking. The puzzles are innovative and smart, the mood is gloomy yet interesting, and overall the game comes together as a complete package. Given that it's FREE to play (at Kongregate, for instance) there's absolutely no reason not to give this one a look.
8.3/10
*To see a SPOILER picture at the ending stages of the game, go here:
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/closure/view_image.html?id=O9Nb4hQl7hmV7Brilg