I have mixed feelings when I think of Nihilumbra.

There are many things it did very very well: the art, the music, the enemies, the plot, the general concept of the game, and of course the controls. The idea of being able to manipulate the world with the mouse by painting colors while moving with the keys is really just done well. The notions of different colors doing different things (a la Portal 2) is simple but highly effective. And the plot is really just positing philosophical questions in a fantasy world, which is really cool. I love the narrator asking questions that get deeper and more serious as the game goes on.

With all that said, there were problems. The first was the colors being unreliable, with brown being the worst. Games like this require precision and I frankly didn't feel like I had it half the time. The ground would sometimes send you bouncing at an angle if you hit it just right and brown would have you suspended vertically on the side of a wall. Compounding this was the fact that enemy hitboxes were a little big; you didn't have to touch an enemy, you just have to get sorta kinda close. All of this is not a big deal until it's amplified by how frustrating void (hard) mode is, which is quite a far step up from normal. And most of its puzzles had to do with disabling one or more of your colors for each puzzle, which I understand, but makes me feel annoyed for some reason.

Really I can talk about this game two ways: normal and void. Normal was fun; easy, but displayed everything I liked about this game. It was such a delight that I could easily overlook the small problems, but it didn't offer much in the way of challenge. Void mode was indeed challenging but more than that it is frustrating. I don't mind being frustrated; Super Meat Boy has given me a ton of frustration but it always draws me back. I almost gave up on Nihilumbra halfway through void mode just because it just crossed the point from "frustrating" to "annoying". For example: certain levels drop you in with an enemy a few steps away. If you don't start moving immediately, you die. This gives you barely any time to observe your surroundings.

I don't want to complain too much because I did like this game and I can't even fully justify why I had to knock it down from 4 to 3 stars, other than I genuinely did drop from "Really Liked" to "Liked" overall. Even if you are just better than me at puzzle-platformers (distinct possibility) the other issues I mentioned are hard to ignore: you simply don't have super control of your character which leads to frustration. It's still a good game and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone. At the very least, normal mode should be enjoyable for all gamers.