Peaks and troughs aside, it remains a fantastic few hours from new devs punching well above their weight. If you're the least bit intrigued by puzzle games on mechanics alone, it's a recommendation.

Reviewing is an inherently unfair practice. It's a two-way conversation with yourself on someone else's work about its value to others - often ignoring provenance, circumstance, and ending up weighing man against colossus on the same set of scales.

Semblance is a good game. An astonishing game, even. As the first game of two South African university students, Kimani and Myres, it both hits the Ubisoft-indie level of production quality and fully explores a set of deformation mechanics unique to the genre. Like the protagonist blob of Semblance itself, Semblance has seemingly been willed into existence from the soil - the indie game - with all the peaks and troughs of such a production. Including, I assume, the struggle all indies face on Steam in gaining any attention or traction.

By having you liberate the worlds of gorgeous crystal, Squish is positioned as one of the greatest morally grey protagonists of our time

Semblance is a literal plat-former puzzler. A self-proclaimed 'postmodern riff on the genre.' It's so fundamental; such a head-slapper of an idea, you immediately scour your mind for its compatriots. They've yet to occur to me. Therein lies the game's contract with the player, I think - the draw - because there are two important things the game is NOT.

One, its gameplay is not one of unfettered creativity. Pronouncements of being a 'playdough platformer' might steer expectation unfairly. You might expect some toy-like revelation wherein puzzle solutions are limited only by your imagination. Not so. It's a much more traditional fare of lateral-thinking demanding (for sure), but heavily constrictive head-scratchers. It seems an odd complaint, but one I've seen made nonetheless.

The puzzles have very set solutions with the tiniest wiggle room, and the semi-dynamic platform deformation headline feature is but the unique means by which they're solved. Is a puzzle better for having a dozen solutions or one? Up to you, but I'd steer towards the latter before I'm shown exactly how you would avoid diluting difficulty or how you properly explore puzzle mechanics without constrictions. Constrictions beget a solution. Could a puzzle really retain the name without a clear solution?

Two, since the indie revolution of the likes of puzzle platformers, Braid and Limbo, narrative grounding has been baked into the player consciousness as a core component. Both as justification for the otherwise abstract shapes and actions, and delivering a personality shorthand for the game's identity and allowing plot-fodder for discourse. People may help each other through the puzzles, but they talk about the ending. The puzzle experience is almost bizarrely, retrospectively abstracted into the experience, nay toil that the player went through for the context of the centrepiece narrative in discussions and ravings. It's as if the narrative discussion is the end-game.

After playing Semblance, I stumbled upon the launch trailer on their Twitter site and could see the problem. The cartoon that head-ended it was chock full of personality, gave a mouth and determination to a blob that didn't back off from the threat like the rest of the plasticine huddled masses and instead dashed to save the day. The game takes it more old-school, intentional or not, and leaves the creatures expressionless; the world but a meeting of a background-foreground assortment of shapes and colour as not more than a simple marker for the area you're in; and the music is either not there or just ethereal moody for worlds that don't especially look it.

A rather close analogue in terms of its blob aesthetic is the recent Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel's The End is Nigh, which included such cartoons (fully voiced) in the game. It also had dramatic classical music and rain-soaked grey backgrounds - all screaming personality.

The point being, I suppose, that in an indie scene of clear identities and personality, Semblance is lacking. The worlds are beautiful like any paintings with vivid colours and shapes would naturally be considered artificially so, but they don't deliver personality. You control a vacuous blob (Squish?) that just happens to be collecting world essences to liberate areas from a crystal-rock invader for creatures that don't even appear upset about it. The rock paintings and shrines as the one attempt at narrative justification fall flat because they fail to communicate much coherently and seem unnecessary in a world seated to just deliver the puzzle mechanics. Semblance has found itself caught in another trap of indie expectation. Its biggest crime isn't an intentionally threadbare narrative (of which the cave paintings might muddy the issue), but what that ends up contributing in the game lacking personality - leaving the gameplay the majority burden of determining player experience.

I think puzzle games of this ilk, unless they're some standout like Braid, often spend their time in the lower training gradations of the running machine for the majority of their playtime. Maybe three to six puzzles will finally charm your socks off and demand a tip of the hat for the connections they demanded of you. I think Semblance fits this well. Its central mechanics intelligently combine the ability to dash horizontally and vertically for movement with the means to deform any colour-coded clay - be it platform or ground. Eventually, you can undynamically self-deform to alter the dynamics of your dashes and jumps and where you can fit. Complicated by manual resets, reset lasers and kill lasers, the full complement of mechanics is unique, and whilst not revolutionary like it has to be marketed, are engaging to work out. This is complemented by the beautiful, but clean presentation that doesn't obfuscate. Whilst lacking personality overall, the graphics are infused with colour and draw clear lines between the functional and the decorative elements.

This game is pure anti-crystal propaganda. Here they are forced to exist in plasticine conditions as a slave underclass.

The world-level structure represented by trees competently introduces and steps up the mechanics in the background of the new. Levels within worlds can be visited in any order, so ramping up of difficulty is explored within the levels and inter-world via layering of the mechanics instead. Puzzles/tree essences are visually represented on the branches of the trees for easy revisiting if they prove too hard. New worlds demand completion, however, so it's not entirely freeform.

What struck me was how absent of frustration or tedium - in spite of getting stuck - it all was. Deformations you've made are intelligently preserved upon dying - a definite potential make or break issue. This ensures a kind of flow to solving the puzzles. You're only punished for your platforming and can fine-tune deformations rather than having them stolen from you. Since platform deforming has a semi-dynamic quality to its physics, it ran the risk of being unreliable and trial and error in nature. Thankfully, this is rarely the case and purposeful choices in deforming the environment don't go wrong for long. The biggest upshots of this being that the more dynamic physics look immensely better than I imagine the alternative would and it gives more perceived creative power to the player, even if the solutions remain static.

All this said, it occasionally commits the cardinal puzzle sin of having easy to work out but hard to execute puzzles. Namely, there are 'propel yourself' sections à la Portal wherein you position reset lasers to use your deformations like a trampoline. The problem being, if deforming to the right, the moment your deformation comes into contact with the laser, you need to be moving to the left, the direction you're about to be propelled, or your movement direction will hamper your momentum and make you miss the jump. It's a definite point of mental incongruity that you can override your momentum with the analog stick, but it's doubly peculiar because there isn't any real reason for it. If your being propelled was just followed through regardless of your movement direction, there wouldn't be any foreseeable issues with the puzzles that involved it. Additionally, deforming round lasers to shift their direction can have a question of trial and error to it, but as stated, it's rarely an issue for long.

After three worlds of layering mechanics in the cuddly, snowy and swamp (should be swampy) worlds, you're rushed off to the previously blocked off big tree to take on the crystal blob. Within ten to twenty minutes of final puzzles and some actual narrative coherency with an implied chasing of the invader (Doom-style angry wall slamming included), we have our abrupt end. All in all, it's an experience with a short fuse, if not comparable to most of its 2D puzzle platformer brethren with a playtime hitting no more than three to four hours at most. One could say it's short and sweet with no fat - not lingering on any of its mechanic explorations for too long. One could also say that with no replayability it's a hard proposition. It's true that the puzzles aside, the shrines and wall paintings are the only things left to pursue as secrets - presumably with some platforming deftness I missed. It's not much. What can be said is that the price definitely accounts for its brevity.

I found the point between weather states in Skyrim

I brought up reviewing itself as preamble, not so I could straddle the line, but because I think Semblance, in particular, comes off badly in the current gaming market. It is beautiful and functional but without clear identity. It's playful with its mechanics without being frustrating, but has a short playtime with no replayability or narrative takeaway. With a price tag showing either awareness of itself or a first-timer reticence, it is a clear proposition. If you have an insatiate need for a modern whole product game to dazzle in a few more areas, this might not fulfil the mainstream success indie's checklist. Fundamentally, however, this is the first product of new devs who have achieved work indicative of much greater means. Even taken in absence of that fact, it remains a fantastic few hours and if you're the least bit intrigued by puzzle games on mechanics alone, it's a recommendation.