Going into any puzzle game, you can expect to put your mental muscles to use working out tricky logic challenges. What’s far less common is a game that lets you create works of art as you solve its puzzles, but that unlikely combination comes together in The Artisan of Glimmith. Due out in March, this chill upcoming game uses logic puzzles to let you craft stained glass windows and show off a little artistic flair at the same time.
Each puzzle in The Artisan of Glimmith is a bite-sized challenge, giving you a uniquely shaped grid to build your stained glass window on. Click and drag anywhere on the grid to place a section of colored glass, which can be any shape or size, but notes to the side of the grid tell you the rules you’ll need to follow to complete your masterpiece. At first, these instructions are simple, showing the shapes you’re allowed to use, but the further you get into the game (or its generous demo), the trickier it is to fulfill all of a puzzle’s conditions.
Puzzles get more difficult as the demo goes on, but at every stage, there’s a mix of lower and higher challenges to choose from. Each puzzle has a numerical difficulty ranking, so you know roughly what you’re getting into. Level one puzzles are generally a breeze with easily internalized rules, while the scattered level five puzzles demand a lot more of you, usually combining multiple different rules to follow on large or irregularly shaped boards.
It’s this blend of chill and challenging that makes The Artisan of Glimmith such a joy to play. Rule sets that simply list a few shapes you need to stick to generally make for an easy, relaxing puzzle, while more complicated conditions require a lot more focus. By the end of the demo, you’ll face puzzles full of symbols that instruct you to place (or avoid placing) matching pieces next to them, tell you how many shapes are allowed to touch each other’s borders, and more.
While you do need to complete some simpler puzzles to unlock more difficult ones, you almost always have a few to choose from at any time on the game’s map, so you can decide how much you want to test yourself. The map itself is lovely, comprising a kingdom of forests, cottages, and stone walls to explore from above. In each region of the map sits a giant stained glass window, which is slowly filled in as you complete puzzles, offering an appealing way to track your progress. More than just a nice aesthetic touch, the game’s world is something of a puzzle itself, hiding levels for you in hard-to-find places if you’re motivated enough to spend some time scrolling and zooming the map until you find them.
Even in the puzzles themselves, aesthetics are more than an afterthought. The Artisan of Glimmith is a game about creating stained glass art, after all, and making your creations look as good as possible is a satisfying, though optional, part of that process. You can change the colors of sections you create as you lay them down or once they’re placed, choosing from a color wheel with multiple variations on each shade. Since every puzzle has just one unique solution, there’s no way to customize the actual pieces of your stained glass, making the color customization a nice artistic touch that works with the themes of the game. The Artisan of Glimmith also features a custom level editor, so the possibility for even wilder creations is there in the full release.
A collection of other tools also offers some helpful ways to make solving puzzles easier. By default, you just slap down colored sections with your mouse, but there’s also an option to add metallic borders instead. That lets you mark off pieces you’re absolutely certain of, while using the quicker default option to add color in spots you’re still figuring out. You can even complete the whole puzzle using these borders if you find the color distracting. There’s also a built-in note-taking option that lets you draw right on the puzzle as you work out where everything goes. At least in the demo, I didn’t find it necessary to take too many notes this way, but it’s a thoughtful option nonetheless, and one that will likely come in handy more as the puzzles get more challenging later on.
Overall, the mix of tricky logic puzzles and relaxing vibes works well for The Artisan of Glimmith. Its puzzles are fun to solve on their own, and getting a unique piece of art at the end is ample motivation to keep going, giving the game a bit of the feeling of solving a good nonogram puzzle or completing one of the Minesweeper-inspired puzzle games of developer Mark Ffrench (Proverbs, Mosaic of the Strange). It scratches the puzzle itch so well I completed the full demo in one sitting and immediately wanted more — fortunately, the full game is only a few weeks away.
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