Parallax Demo

There are a lot of ways to design a puzzle game, especially nowadays when there are so many tools at your disposal to quickly prototype your ideas. Even if you do not come up with a completely new concept, it’s also enough to just modify an already existing idea and present it in a different way. Valve’s Portal has been reimagined in countless ways ever since it was released, and there are still many ways to innovate in the genre.

Parallax is a first-person puzzle game in which the main goal is to get to the end of every level by going through a maze of portals between two opposite worlds. It can be a tad confusing at first, especially if this is your first contact with this type of games, but the whole thing starts to make sense after the tutorial. In fact, it’s a fairly enjoyable adventure that gets more challenging later on.

In short, your goal is to use portals between two opposite worlds in order to reach the final checkpoints. Some paths are only visible in one of the two worlds, and all sorts of other buttons and switches make an appearance along the way, which complicate things. To top things off, the black and white color theme can be a tad disorienting as well, especially when the environments grow more complex.

Although there are some platforming elements in the game, they are not very important in the grand scheme of things, given the fact that all you have to do is time your jumps and move as efficiently as possible through the portals. It sounds fairly simple, but it’s anything but that once the stages start to get more complex and the number of portals increases.

Later on some boosters and special platforms allow you to trick gravity and perform a few other neat tricks, but the action does not get out of hand along the way. As mentioned before, the graphics are entirely black & white, but it’s not an issue in this case, given the fact that the color scheme makes sense when you consider the game’s goal. The controls are snappy and responsive, especially since you can also use a gamepad.

In the end, Parallax is obviously not an original concept, but it brings its own input on the idea and provides you with a challenging and enjoyable experience. Hence, it’s a great pick for the fans of the genre, especially if you are down with the weird graphics as well.