Try to solve a series of interconnected puzzle rooms in the demo for Looking for Fael

David Brownman, 20 August 2025

Looking for Fael's demo wastes no time setting up its premise: your roommate, Fael, is... lost in your shared apartment? Expecting something unusual, it's somehow all the more surprising when you load into the actual game to find yourself in the bog-standard lobby of an apartment building, complete with a broken elevator (but maintenance promises it'll be fixed soon). Upon reaching your apartment, you realize it's a nice 3 bed, 1 bath, but not exactly big enough to lose someone in. In fact, there's nothing remarkable about the apartment at all besides a thick black cable running through all the rooms and a weird electronic panel by the doorway. Everything, as you might have guessed, is not as it seems.

I generally enjoyed the 30 or so minutes I got to spend in the world of Looking for Fael. The whole thing took place in an apartment with an impossible layout: hallways that looped, rooms that should overlap with each other, etc. There's an ever-present sense of unease as you explore: the total banal apartment mixed with surreal and fantastical intrusions. The setting almost reminded me of the liminal spaces in Control (albeit with very different gameplay). 

Gameplay-wise, the demo teased just enough about the world to make me interested in more, but didn't give so much away that I felt like I'd seen all there was to see. It spent its time showcasing (what I assume are) the game's two main types of puzzles: environmental and pixel-based. 

The environmental puzzles take obvious inspiration from adventure games like Myst, with puzzle elements scattered around a 3D area. And in classic adventure game fashion, it's not immediately clear what you're even supposed to do (which is part of the fun). The demo's main environmental puzzle involves a series of projectors showing mysterious iconography overlaid on photorealistic videos of bugs that you can pause at opportune moments. The bug videos are a little disconcerting, but they're played to good effect. It reinforces the fact that the only thing you can expect is the unexpected.

To break up the exploration segments, there's also a series of pixel-based puzzles. They're played on a small handheld device with the graphics of a GameBoy that you'll plug into terminals found around the apartment. In the puzzles, there are specific grid tiles you have to cover by rotating and launching tetrominos from dedicated spawn points on the sides of the screen. It's a fairly simple concept, but the difficulty ramped up quickly across the 5ish puzzles we got in the demo. I appreciated the pixel puzzles as a change of pace, but these felt like the weaker half of the game so far. I enjoyed exploring so much that having to stop and play GameBoy for a second hurt the pacing for me. But much like the rest of the game, I'm sure there'll be more to these than meets the eye.

As far as exploration goes, there are a lot of directions the devs can take the game. It might be like Antichamber and its non-Euclidean geometry (some of which we've already seen). Or it'll focus more on magical realism: rooms that almost seem realistic except for, say, a tree growing where it shouldn't be (something we also see in the demo). And, if you're worried that there's only so much they can pack into a single floor plan, have no fear. On top of the initial apartment itself, that door panel I mentioned before acts like a magic elevator, totally changing what's beyond the door based on what you type in. The keypad accepts tetromino-like shapes as input, so I have a feeling elements that seem like the disparate puzzle types mentioned above will come together in exciting and unexpected ways.

Overall, the demo intrigued me enough to want to see what comes next. There are some cool and original ideas at play, and I think if they don't make the puzzles too annoying (excessive backtracking, poor pacing, etc), then there'll be a lot to love. This is developer Swing Swing Submarine's 4th puzzle game (the same developers who made Tetrobot and Co.), but their first in 3D. I'm excited to see what they do with the extra dimension!