Fringe Theory Demo

There’s certainly no shortage of clever puzzle games out there, especially when it comes to indie productions. Given the nature of the genre, almost everything you can come up with is fair game as long as it provides the players with a challenge. The greatest annoyance you might stumble upon is that the puzzle mechanics tend to become repetitive after a while.

Fringe Theory is a first-person puzzle game that’s supposedly about PTSD, although it’s pretty difficult to tell that from the demo. The full game promises a variety of exciting gameplay mechanics, such as rock climbing, a morale system and dynamic weather, but the demo feels like your run-of-the-mill adventure game, which is not at all a bad thing anyway.

In fact, the puzzles can be quite challenging, or at least one of them. Unfortunately, challenging in this case means that it takes you longer to come up with a solution, but the goal is clear from the start. Hence, you know that you must rotate a couple of levers in order to activate the mechanism, it’s just that there are so many possible combinations. This might get boring after a while, at least if the mechanics do not change on a regular basis.

The game world is rather restricted in the demo, given the fact that it all takes place in some kind of facility with limited space. However, you can tell that the developers put quite a bit of effort into the level design, which makes you wonder how the full game is going to look. You can also interact with a few objects and push chairs around, but this side is still pretty unrefined at the moment.

On the other hand, the graphics are quite luxurious, at least in certain aspects. The environmental lighting and the textures look nice, but there is some trouble with the flashlight, since it doesn’t seem to work all that well. The post-processing effects can cause some annoyances as well, depending on how powerful your computer is.

All things considered, Fringe Theory’s got a reach chance at greatness, at least if the developers manage to put all of their ideas into practice. However, they need your help in order to achieve that, and you can do that by participating in their Kickstarter campaign, or by voting for the game on Steam Greenlight.