My first thought before starting Neverout was that I was about to play a game that looked a lot like the 1997 Canadian film Cube (DO NOT WATCH THE TRAILER as it contains major plot spoilers, just watch the film here), where a group of strangers band together to find their way out of a series of puzzle and trap-laden interlocking rooms. Essentially that kind of what Neverout from developer Game Dust is about, but it is simplified a bit here. First off, there is, at the moment at least, no narrative beyond solving the puzzle in each room (which I will get to) to move along to the next room. In each room you are able to move along all surfaces in the six-sided room, rotating the room so that you are always on the bottom of the room. By rotating the rooms, you can affect some objects in the room like sliding boxes, which if you are positioned wrong when you rotate a room, can crush and kill you.
Neverout starts you out in a four-walled room without any context as to why you are there, how you got there, or what you are supposed to do. Although the mechanical chunk noise followed by a scream from an adjoining room indicates that there is something that can very much kill you. But, because this is a video game, it is obvious to figure out that after you seemingly wake up, that you need to do something. As you start moving around the room, you come to a wall and, perhaps by accident, you move forward "at" the wall, only to find that the room rotates and a portal appears on the ceiling with 02 on it. There is also a mechanical grinding sound to further give credence that the room is rotating as opposed to you being able to scale walls. Since this is a new addition to the room, you check out this portal which opens up as you approach it. You fall through and are now in another four-walled room where a cat-walk comes slicing out of the walls, although it is harmless. These are the tutorial levels, giving you the basics for how the puzzles work in the game, and how to get you in the right frame of mind so to be able to solve them. For the most part. Each new mechanic introduced in the 20 tutorial levels is visualized by one of five different color-coded rooms:
- Beige/Yellow: Catwalks and sliding blocks (blocks can kill you).
- Blue: Teleportation squares.
- Green: Electricity barriers (electricity can kill you).
- Red: Buttons that require a block to pass over them (which then remains stationary).
Once you finish the 20 levels of the tutorial you are taken to a HUB room of sorts that will put you in another 20 rooms of a specific color where you do only those types of puzzles. So when you enter the red portal, you will be doing the button (see above) puzzles. 20 of them. As in 20 more puzzles.
One thing I want to quickly mention is the movement mechanic, and I say mechanic because this was a conscious decision by the developers to restrict movement. Even though Neverout is first-person, moving is still on a grid. You can look around as smoothly as you please, but when you move, you cannot move diagonally, only straight, back, left, or right. This restricted movement is because there are a number of puzzles that you could cheat your way to the portal by skirting the diagonal and potentially bypass the solution. By forcing the player to only move along the grid, it ensures that they are forced to solve the puzzle the way that the designers intended. That is not to say that you cannot glitch your solutions, especially if you are playing it in VR, but on the Switch, I do not see cheesing out the solution to be an option.
Presently, I have finished the first 20 levels of the tutorial and then scattered levels from the rest of the rooms, primarily from the beige/yellow puzzles, being some of the less complex puzzles especially compared to the teleportation and electricity barrier rooms. I have found myself able to do a couple of puzzles at a time, but then I have to stop, especially if I become stuck, frustrated and a little dizzy. There are times when I have found it difficult to tell which way is up and then I remember to look down at the ground. Thankfully you are able to exit out of a room at any time and go back to the HUB as I will then sometimes attempt another color, but other times I will just stare at the various rooms, then exit out of the game, because 100 of these puzzles is a lot. Like, a lot - a lot.
If there were only 10 puzzles for each color, thereby eliminating 40 puzzles from the game, you would still have this fun first-person puzzle game with 6o puzzles, but for me, knowing that there are 20 puzzles just seems daunting in a way that feels almost oppressive. That is the best way I have to explain it. Maybe it would work better, as in I would feel more compelled to play more during each sitting if there was a story, character development, music that was not primarily ambient, but it is really all that I can handle. Typically after Neverout I will head over to Mario Picross on the Super Nintendo app and play a couple of puzzles there just to mentally cool down because I need a bit of a breather after that.
I could see myself not finishing Neverout, relegated to the pile of Switch games I have started by not completed because I am stumped and refuse to look up solutions on GameFAQS or YouTube, but I think if I keep the game around and play a couple of levels here and there I will eventually finish it.
Eventually.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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