Lightmatter (2020)

What is Lightmatter? A puzzle platformer where you play an anonymous silent protagonist, trapped in a laboratory where some benevolent and totally-sane scientists created LIGHTMATTER, a source of infinite* energy! When something goes horribly wrong and the laboratory is rocked by explosions, you must find a convoluted way out before the whole place collapses around you. You even get guidance of a sort in the form of Virgil, head researcher and CEO of Lightmatter, who gives you helpful directions (when he's not being a paranoid, deranged ass). Unfortunately, a side-effect of the disaster is that shadows now consume human flesh, so you'll have to find your way around without ever leaving the light.

And that is where the game's one big mechanic comes into play - wherever you go and whatever you do, you cannot touch the shadows. Any area that isn't touched by light is instant death. So there's that. The team over at Tunnel Vision Games honestly do a pretty good job squeezing as many novel puzzle ideas out of this toy as they can; things only start feeling a bit same-y and contrived near the end. And thankfully they hired a pretty darn good voice actor fella to narrate the whole thing, playing the part of a narcissistic CEO who very clearly would rather not be stuck babysitting you the entire time. All told, it's nothing spectacular, but it's not a bad formula overall.

But then we get to the other question: what is Lightmatter not? And the big honking answer there is that Lightmatter is not Portal, no matter how much it tries to be. Describing itself in ads as an "homage to first person puzzlers" and scattering "Aperture Science" and "Cave Johnson" and "cake" references throughout the script, I found myself getting angry at the game for pretending so hard to be associated with a more successful game series. The light mechanic is less creative and interesting than Portal's portal mechanic. Period. The frienemy dialogue from GLaDOS is better written than the frienemy dialogue from Virgil. Period. And as far as I can tell, there's no actual connection between Tunnel Vision Games and any of the people who worked on the Portal series. It's a bit like trying to sell your fan fiction as an official part of another author's literary universe, and it's a touch creepy.

All told, I'm giving Lightmatter two stars. Three for quality, negative one for being a Milhouse.