A while back (Sunday, December 20th) I completed Neverout in a spree of completing twelve rooms in a single sitting, which considering my First Impressions article, was kind of a feat, but I will get to that in a moment. If you are unfamiliar with Neverout by Polish developer GameDust, I suggest you read my First Impressions article first, then come back here and I will clear up some misconceptions I had about the game, some of which I already publically declared over on Twitter. That being said, I will try to sum up what Neverout is about. You are an undescribed person who mysteriously finds themselves in a cube of interlocking rooms filled with puzzles and traps that lead you into other rooms filled with more puzzles and traps which you complete as you make your way out (DO NOT WATCH THE TRAILER!!).
So, the format of Neverout is interesting, which is what threw me and my reason for initially being overwhelmed with the idea of the game after playing through the tutorial levels. When you start the game, you play through 20 levels that give you a taste of how the game is played as well as how the color of the room prepares you for the types of traps and puzzles that are in each room. Blue rooms have teleportation puzzles, yellow rooms have sliding blocks that can kill you, green rooms have electricity and/or spikes on spaces that will kill you, red have magnetic floor tiles that you have to get a sliding block onto. But there was more to it than that past the tutorial stages and once you have completed those, you are taken to a central hub where you can decide what color room/puzzles you want to play. It was at this point before I completed any of the four colored rooms that I made the assumption that each color would have its own 20 rooms to solve, but I was wrong and it turned out there were only 12. And different elements from the different rooms can make their way into other puzzles, making them more and more complex.
In the blue rooms, you end up having sliding blocks along with the primary portals, in the green rooms, there ended up being portals, sliding blocks, magnets, spike pits, and the common electricity. See, when you are playing, if you choose a room that is, at least at the moment, too difficult, you can leave at any time to return to the central room and pick another series of rooms to go to. A green room with electricity, sliding blocks, and spike pits too much? You can exit back to the hub and attempt a series of blue rooms with the teleportation (and sliding blocks) rooms. This allowed me to attempt rooms and if I was overwhelmed or like I needed a change of scenery (or color), I could return to the HUB and choose a new room. While there was zero in-game explanation as to how/why this was possible, I sided on the side of don't know, don't care. And now that I think about it, that scream that you hear in the opening room just seems to be there to tell the player that you can die here and that there are other people in this series of cubic puzzles. Almost like there could have been the inklings of a story that followed you through, but that was rejected for more puzzles. Maybe. That is just speculation.
For me, I initially thought that completing the yellow and blue rooms were the easiest for me, and in that order. For the portals, there was a fair amount of figuring out how the room needed to be oriented after moving a sliding block throughout the room to have it positioned just right so you could land on it next to the exit portal. This used a lot of brainpower and I found that I could only attempt and solve two to three puzzles at a time before I needed to stop for the afternoon/day. After flipping between the yellow and blue rooms, with doing a green or red room to give me something different to do, I had finished those first two series of rooms and decided to hunker down and complete the green room puzzles. This might have been a bad decision because I found the green rooms to be the most difficult out of the entire game. Especially once the spike pits were introduced, sometimes replacing the electricity floor tiles, but I just found myself only able to complete one before needing to put the game down.
Then the morning of December 20th, I apparently was in the perfect headspace because I was able to complete a room that had been giving me troubles in what felt like fewer than 10 room rotations. I started on Green-9 and soon finished the remaining three rooms, moving on to the remaining rooms starting with Red-4. It was at this point, rather late in the game now that I think about it, that I started to focus on just one part of the puzzle instead of trying to take it all in once I was able to solve each puzzle in less time than if I tried to do to many things at once. There were a couple of rooms however that you had to do a specific set of moves right off the bat or the room was, or at least seemed like it was unsolvable and the only way to reset was to have yourself killed (or I guess you could have returned to the HUB and then back to the room, but that would have been too many steps and taken too long). I genuinely felt that the Red rooms were easier to manage than the Green rooms.
I will not reveal the end of the game, but I will say that it was a little anti-climactic, but that seemed built into the game. Because after the first 20 rooms, you could complete the rest of the groupings of rooms in any order, there was no penultimate room that contained any kind of story point. Once you finish the final room in the last group you have to complete, the lights reach the last portal and that takes you to the credits. Kind of. There is a little bit more to it than that, but that would be spoiling. Perhaps if it took you to a final puzzle to solve that incorporated everything from electricity, spikes, portals, sliding blocks, and magnets in a room that was larger than XxX, that might have been a nice touch. I of course say this now about a month out from already beating the game when past-me was perfectly fine with the game ending when it did.
My only other critique might only be specific to the Switch port, but the game offered the ability to replay rooms after returning to the HUB. As in, if I wanted to, I could replay the 3rd tutorial room. The only reason I could think of is that in other versions, maybe there is a timer or an achievement to complete a room with a certain number of room rotations or the fewest number of steps to complete a room. That is really it.
GameDust put together a fun game with an interesting concept that I loved, but only after I got past my preconceived notion that I would have an additional 80 rooms after the first 20 tutorial stages. Maybe throw in more hints of a story like objects lying around in the HUB, scratches on walls, a pair of shoes in the corner of a room that flop around but have no actual bearing on anything that happens in the room. Little touches like that that also build off of the scream you hear at the beginning. Maybe in Neverout 2?
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Prelude to the Void
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