I love puzzles in games, but if you’re going to give me a 10-step locked box, the least you could do is make the logic of the puzzle clear, rather than rely on me being interested enough to poke and prod at things in the hope that the square pegs start slotting into the circular holes. When you start playing you’ve got three options: play without hints, play with some hints, or play with a lot of hints, and I turned the third one on pretty quickly, because the slow movement pace of the main character, coupled with trial-and-error nature of the puzzles to figure out what goes where, became an aggravating process that crushed the game’s momentum. The problem is that these puzzles are also obtuse and generally obnoxious. Indeed, too much gameplay might have distracted players from the point, you see. It never needed complex gameplay systems. Most of those puzzles are a trail of breadcrumb stuff – flip a switch to get this key that opens that door – and there’s nothing wrong with that in concept, given that The Plane Effect is, effectively, a wordless narrative experience rather than a game. It plays out from an isometric perspective, but it’s really a “walking simulator” with a couple of interactive puzzles along the way. Now, in fairness, The Plane Effect isn’t much of a game, and what little game is in there isn’t great. Firstly as someone who works far too hard myself (it’s currently 9:00pm on a Friday night and I’m here, writing reviews), I do see myself in the avatar, and secondly, because the melancholic atmosphere in The Plane Effect is all the denser when you realise that most players will barely register the misery that drips from this experience. The Plane Effect affected me pretty deeply, and that’s for two reasons. As the person starts to experience what seems to be hallucinations and struggles to remember who their family is, many players are going to just shrug their shoulders because all that matters in the game that they play is how much fun the puzzles are.

They see a man working late in the night and, with the deep level of tolerance that they have for developers crunching themselves to death and/or mental distress for our entertainment, they don’t see the cruelty behind this scene.

So when you’re introduced to your mute little salaryman in The Plane Effect, plugging away at his computer late into the night, the office bathed in the warm flow of advertising slogans from outside (which only make the pools of darkness seem more sinister), then it’s hard not to see this as a deeply introspective game that most people – including those that play it – will find too difficult to connect with.

The plane effect game