Semblance (Review)

Semblance is an innovative platformer with deformable terrain, set in a beautiful minimalist world. Where you deform and reshape the environment to solve puzzles. Semblance is developed by Nyamakop and published Good Shepherd Entertainment.

An unfortunate turn of events has happened, causing the once soft and squishy world to be engulfed in spikey green crystals and twisted vines. You play as Squish a purple slime like creature who must purify all the corruption that has spread across the land, and endangered its inhabitants. There is a brief cutscene right at the beginning of the game, and the rest of the story is told indirectly through hidden cave paintings throughout the levels. But that's about as deep as the narrative goes, so you're left to piece together the meaning of the story by what unfolds in the cave paintings. If you don't care too much about the story, you can just ignore it and focus on the gameplay.

Like most 2D platformers you have your basic jump and dash (4-directional only), but what makes Semblance stand out from other 2D platformers is the ability to deform and morph the terrain to complete the puzzles and challenges presented to you. dashing and smashing into the squishy platforms will cause them to change position, form, and height. This makes it possible to get under, over, and on to areas that otherwise would be unreachable. While deceptively simple at first, additional mechanics are introduced the further you get. For example there are red beams that reset the position of your terraformed platform causing you to be launched, there are glowing areas that prevent you from dashing, and later in the game you will have the ability to squish yourself on the hard terrain to change shape. These all add up to make some very cleverly designed puzzles that you will have to solve using everything you've learned throughout the course of the game.

Visually semblance is endowed in a minimalistic style that is calming and colorful, and yet also somber with its mellow tones of purple, teal, and green pastels. Everything looks wonderfully soft and squishy, the alien world is full of quirky charming little critters. It reminds me of The End is Nigh, if it was colorful and squishy instead of bleak and depressing. There are three different segments of levels, each with its individual color scheme. Each segment has 6 levels and within every level there are 6 pink orbs to be collected in order to cleanse the area of infection. The game is non-linear so you can choose the levels you feel like playing, and leave the ones you're stumped on for later, for when you feel like going back and trying them again. The game is pretty short, on average you can probably beat it in a couple of hours, so keep that in mind when considering your purchase if that's something you care about.

Although I liked the ability to deform terrain, I couldn't help but notice its limitations. Once you've moved a platform you can no longer change its shape, if you shift part of a platform in one direction you cannot shift another part of that platform in another direction. This last one is just a personal opinion, I feel like having a 4-directional dash is also a limitation in the flexibility of platforming and how you are able to complete challenges and puzzles, but maybe that's just me. Semblance does have a few bugs and glitches, for example your Squish will get stuck in walls pretty often, thankfully the developers have added the option to reset your squish so it's not that big of a deal.

Semblance is a fresh take on platforming with a loveable minimalistic art style and cleverly crafted puzzles, that although has a few limitations and bugs, still has the potential to be the next big indie game. Semblance is available for $9.99 on Pc/Steam and the Nintendo Switch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5suwRJXQKs