Born from the independent team of only 3 people, which takes the name of Beard Envy, Filament it is undoubtedly an interesting project. After the announcement that it will arrive at the beginning of next year, the title has unfortunately quickly passed on the sly. The publisher Kasedo Games, also not economically powerful, has not yet managed to spread the word about this adventure in the best possible way, which nevertheless deserves special attention.
We have a puzzle title in our hands, but at the same time investigative. The experience takes its essence with both hands in what we could define a mix between the very famous triple I The Witness and Firewatch, managing to amalgamate everything to create its very strong identity (fully indisputable considering what is shown). We had the opportunity to try Filament in preview, through the Steam platform on PC, let's see how it went.
The mysterious Alabaster and her crew
Catapulted into the adventure, you immediately find yourself on what is clearly shown as a spaceship, even if you do not know where the latter is located, why, let alone who the protagonist is. To welcome us in this experience we find almost immediately the voice of one of the crew members. With extremely high quality dubbing, albeit unfortunately relegated to the English language as well as the subtitles, Juniper will introduce us to the current situation… With the dropper.
Each new information will in fact be narrated after the completion of the levels, each of which however will be followed by very few lines of dialogue. What we can anticipate is that the entire crew has left the ship, with the exception of the woman we are communicating with. We did not have access to the entire story and we could only taste the introduction, but we can assure you that this is particularly interesting from the very beginning. The spirit of the narrative patented by the Firewatch walking simulator makes itself felt, but fortunately the entire narrative sector is readjusted to the experience and not copied, even if visibly slowed down.
The exploration seasoned by the riddles of Filament
To be able to enjoy history it is necessary to travel far and in largo the gigantic spaceship. It is not a question of walking around in circles in search of something, because the gameplay phases are positioned in a highly visible way and turn out to be quite constant. Impossible not to notice the inspiration to The Witness, a title that has made school on how to best amalgamate an open map and puzzles that can be solved - in their almost totality - in the order in which the player prefers.
The real highlights of the adventure, however, are the filaments, which appear in style as soon as you embark on a level. Once you get close to small towers - really present in large quantities inside the spaceship - you will be catapulted into scenarios, where the real experience finally begins. We are faced with a gameplay at the beginning clearly simple and intuitive, but despite the characteristic just mentioned will remain constant throughout the experience, we cannot say the same of the first: sespecially in the early stages it is necessary only connect several monoliths and exit through the main door, although we can assure you that this it will turn out to be much more complicated with time than it might seem at first glance.
The extreme variety of levels is in fact easily understandable, at least in the part of experience that we have had the opportunity to try, but the difficulty is certainly increasing and well calibrated. The player is accompanied in the discovery of new mechanics before they are thickened. Although at some point overcoming a single scenario will be time-consuming, it is always enough to rack your brains to get to the head of the problem, each time learning some new gem that will then be necessary to solve the next puzzle.
Technically surprising ... and fluctuating
In addition to a completely original gameplay, Filament can boast of an apparently extremely successful technical sector. Input lag is non-existent e the extreme responsiveness of the commands literally leaves you speechless already at the beginning of the adventure; it will therefore be natural to want this feature to be implemented in all existing video games. Nevertheless, the graphics settings are really tight and undoubtedly to be reviewed, especially for some glitches in the menu related to the choice of resolution.
Furthermore, during thescouting it will be realized that this is excessively in some places slow, perhaps for an extremely personal choice of the development studio, perhaps for an excessively large map compared to the actual necessary. Bugs are also very often present, especially in puzzle levels, which sometimes will have to start over for the strands that come off or for the character who sometimes tends to get stuck.
Graphically, fortunately, there is not much to complain about. The style in some ways low-poly is really nice - once you lose your head to be able to set the right resolution - and this manages to evolve over the course of the experience. Both in the levels and inside the spaceship a greater amount of color and vibrancy is gradually released, managing to give the right impact on the screen. The accompanying soundtrack is certainly well done but in the long run too repetitive, adding a few more OSTs should be a prerogative of the development team.
What we were able to savor from the Filament preview is certainly promoted. The game showed how to bring a fresh and new formula in style, albeit not particularly innovative as it was inspired by other more famous works. With a better advertising campaign and some technical refinement, the experience will surely become a cornerstone of all future puzzle-centered titles.
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