Classical Glass
HIGH A dense stack of high-quality and various puzzles.
LOW Some rule variants are less intuitive than others.
WTF The bootleg hobbit holes in some parts of the map.
The Artisan of Glimmith has an interesting provenance. Developer Lunarch Studios previously brought us Islands of Insight, an enormous, quixotic experience that was given away for free for 24 hours a few months after its release to build a player base. This base was necessary because Islands wasnât just the sprawlingest, openest-world puzzler ever made, but one served with MMO-style shared-world elements.
However, problems dogged this admirably eccentric vision, and rather than abandoning their progeny and running for the hills, Lunarch decided to shut down the Islands servers and patch the game to be entirely single player in what gaming historians are already calling âa real bro move.â
Yes, the world was not ready for IoIâs ambition â the Marketâs blind idiot gods would never accept something so inherently, opulently niche. MMOs, after all, are about Making Profit Forever, and there wasnât enough profit in Islands to grant it even the conditional immortality of an always-online experience.
But it wasnât purely faceless forces that sealed IoIâs fate, because its sheer breadth hit mixedly even amongst the hardcore puzzleheads. IoI contained 10,000 puzzles spread across more than 20 different formats, but these formats were not created equal (some of can hardly be called puzzles at all), and there were those who didnât enjoy the glut of low-impact filler â the IoI equivalent of MMO trash mobs â crowding out the good stuff, specifically the logic grid puzzle set on which the designers obviously expended the most effort and channeled the most creativity.
This prelude is important to Artisan because it is, essentially, a pure distillate of Islands of Insight. Itâs the result of that earlier cyclopean bulk being pared back so extensively as to almost completely hide the lineage. Artisan is a single-player experience focused on logic grid-style puzzling, and thatâs it â gone is the open world, the platforming, the multiple puzzle types, and any whiff of another human being. This is a much humbler title, but it absolutely shines because of it.
In The Artisan of Glimmith players are the artisan, and theyâre in Glimmith, restoring stained glass windows piece by piece by solving logic puzzles, much as the master craftsmen of yore did. These puzzles are comprised of grids of squares, and these squares must be divided up into different colored segments according to an expansive suite of rules.
Each region of the Glimmithian map (more anon) focuses chiefly around a single rule and its implications. A simple, early rule is âNumbered Regions.â If a square has a number on it, that means its region must consist of that many squares exactly. The designers have ranked each puzzle from 1 â 7, with 7 being the hardest, and they really do seem to winnow out all meaningful permutations of each rule, as well as many interactions between different rules.
Puzzle quality here is quite good. Thereâs definitely a little bloat, particularly in the number of introductory puzzles in each zone, but the design rigor in the mid- to high-difficulty puzzles offers more than enough mental chew to satiate the more ravenous seekers of cerebral sustenance in the audience. Glimmith looks relaxing, it sounds relaxing, but it hits hard when it wants to, with gold completions in each region (awarded for solving all standard puzzles in a zone) and optional superboss puzzles hung out there for the truly dedicated.
There are also plenty of rolling green hills for a casual player to run around in without stumbling into the gnarlier stuff, and I think most people will finish the main campaign and feel satisfied with their purchase. Glimmith successfully navigates the Scylla and Charybdis that are the casual and hardcore puzzle fan demographics, and feels both old and new in that way. Think of it as a mutated fugue on Nikoli-style pencil puzzles, or the apex predator of Big Fish era puzzlers â something your mom would play if she had a Steam account and was into Raymond Smullyan.
There are no overarching metapuzzles in the Talos Principle-ian sense, but Glimmithâs overworld does have many hidden puzzles â and the camera must be positioned just so to see them. Itâs just a light sprinkling of Hidden Object, and is completely optional for those interested in just âbeatingâ the game. Moreover, once the main story is finished, Glimmith provides players with tools for finding puzzles without having to look for them, turning the overworld completely into what it already mostly was â a fancied up level selection screen.
Ludo-ergonomically, there isnât much to complain about. Given that this is an experience about making stained glass windows, I deeply appreciate Lunarch allowing players to pick the pigments they want to use on each section, and the toggle-able note-taking mode is also great. Iâll say that setting up custom palettes (so that regions are only painted in certain shades) is a bit fiddly, and I could stand more granularity in configuring what specific shade of each color Iâm working with, but overall everything here is good.
In fact, the whole game is good â itâs not an all-time great, but a rare, pure example of something unambitious and also essentially perfect. Iâm nearing 30 happy hours spent making stained glass and, conservatively, have another 30 hours of time left here, should I choose to pursue it. Again, Glimmith is not high concept, it isnât beating anybody over the head with its cleverness, but its calm, dependable quality flows from it like a river or a cool breeze. For those into puzzle games who somehow donât already own it, todayâs the day. Have at it.
Score: 8 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed by Lunarch Studios and published by Lunarch Studios and 983 Interactive. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 23 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: At the time of review this game was not yet rated by the ESRB, but I wish it were because it would be funny to read the orgâs matter of fact summary of a game that is 100% benign and unviolent from tip to tail. Donât see this game being a huge hit with the kids given that it isnât about dabbing Minions or evil mascot characters or whatever, but, if they do play it, unless theyâre suffering from acute vitrophobia, this is fine for them and anyone else.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Thereâs no plot in Glimmith, but there are occasional hint messages as well as text (see examples above) explaining whatever solving rules are currently present, so text size is a consideration here. The font can be resized, but only to one maybe 25% larger version â better than nothing, and hopefully good enough most of the time, but I wish there was more granularity and extended size options. Given that the rule text is large by default and accompanied by a visual element, however, Iâm going to say this game is fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: The game supports keyboard + mouse only, and the controls cannot be remapped. Keyboard controls are simple, with right/left/center clicking being the primary method of interaction, supplemented by a clutch of keystrokes and hotkeys for advanced, but useful, functionality like instantly filling areas with color.
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