The Bridge Review (PC)

Great artstyle, sketchy puzzles. I really dig the penciled, black and white art direction of The Bridge, but the puzzles will make you feel more frustrated than smart. It takes some obvious cues from games like Braid and reminds me of Monument Valley, but the easy to understand, reasonable difficulty curve of those titles are lost on The Bridge.

  You move your avatar around and tilt the game world left or right while collecting keys and avoiding falling off the map or getting hit by a death ball. The simple concept should lend itself to clean, heady puzzles, but fails as much as it succeeds. The line art ends up getting in the way: it can be near impossible to tell what plane your character is standing or will end up while moving. Many of the puzzles are also physics based and it's quite easy to screw something up by (reasonably) not thinking you should be finagaling the touchy objects as much as you have to. This leads to frustrating solutions you'll most likely solve by endless tinkering and guesswork rather than looking at a level and feeling smart by reasoning it out.