The eerie, cryptic puzzle-platformer exploration game Nonolith has been highly anticipated for some time (making an appearance in our recently announced nominees for Most Anticipated Game), and last week we got our hands on the game's first demo, finally allowing us to drop into this strange world of shapes and symbols and begin our work of peeling back its unexplained layers.
Starting the demo, I was treated to an eerie cutscene of a rotating crystal speaking riddles to me in a deep, unsettling voice, before being dropped into a strange void of a world populated by multicolored blocks and lights. Immediately my mind went to games like Animal Well, a dark, subterranean adventure filled with secrets, and interestingly I also thought of Fez: a bit of a throwback, but the serene and synth-laden soundtrack combined with the emphasis on block-shapes filling the world around me brought the experience back in a flash.
You can't jump very high or run very fast in Nonolith, and your main method of interacting with this bizarre world is your ability to "capture" chunks of the environment and carry them over your head, eventually depositing the pattern of blocks elsewhere to either aid in your platforming or combine with other blocks to produce some interesting interactions, almost none of which I understand entirely so far. (I also felt a curious memory of playing Minecraft flit through my head while digging a tunnel through the earth, grabbing blocks and placing them behind me to carve out a staircase.)
Realizations about the world around me came quickly: I can only grab blocks in a specific space above me, meaning I can only access and alter my surroundings from specific angles and directions. These doors seem to require block-shaped keys, and perhaps these significant-looking glowing blocks will interact with them, if I could just get them in the right orientation...
Soon I was solving puzzles without realizing I'd started them, and surprising things were happening as the result of my actions, leading to further questions. You can "zoom out" to a sort of level select which also exists on a grid of cryptic symbols; there's a very clear sense that there are layers to all of this discovery.
I haven't played much yet, but so far, I love just how little Nonolith is willing to explain itself. It feels like a pure form of exploration and figure-it-out-yourself that we only see once in a blue moon, and the atmosphere of the game is unique and undeniable. You can play the demo now or wishlist the game on Steam, due out late next year.
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