A great puzzle game will make you lose all sense of time as you keep hitting the “just one more puzzle” button into the wee hours of the morning. Prism Light the Way from Eidos and Gamesauce has an interesting premise, and is fun for brief moments, but its bland presentation and subpar music keep it from being something you can’t put down.
The premise is that deep in a black hole exists a world called Oog, populated by quantum beings called the Glowbos. The Glowbos exist by feeding on light; however the Evil Bhobail shows up and starts consuming all of the light, in effect starving the Glowbos to death. The Bulboids, a race of light producing creatures from a planet orbiting the Glowbos’ black hole, come together to help the Glowbos by producing light for the Glowbos to feed upon. You job is to position the Glowbos on various grids and using prisms, mirrors, beam splitters and colored filters feed the Glowbos with light from the Bulboids. Heavy stuff.
The meat of the game is the Puzzle mode which consists of 120 puzzles of increasing difficulties. Each puzzle consists of a grid of varying shapes, a certain number of hungry Glowbos of differing colors and usually far fewer light-producing Bulboids. Using the tools presented with each puzzle stage, the player has to move objects around with the stylus to split, filter, color and bounce around light from the Bulboids to not only hit all of the Glowbos, but match up the right colored light with the right colored Glowbos. For the first 40 puzzles, you can get hints as to where to place all of the various puzzle elements, however once you hit stage 41, you’re on your own. Some puzzles can be completed in less than 15 seconds, however as you progress you’ll find some deviously tricky puzzles that will have you stymied for 10 – 15 minutes.
Along with the puzzle mode, there’s a time trial mode where puzzles are randomly generated in sets of ten and you receive medals based on how long it takes to complete the set. Hints are available in this mode as well, but using them causes a time penalty. Hyper mode gives you a grid, one Bulboid and constantly appearing Glowbos whose voracious appetites must be sated with a constant stream of photons. Not getting to the Glowbos quickly enough causes their untimely demise. Once too many Glowbos head to the great beyond, the puzzle is over. Infinite mode has no time constraints, just puzzle after puzzle with points given for successful completion and for finishing the puzzle with some unused items. As with the other modes, hints are available, however points are deducted for using them
A cooperative mode via single card download play is available consisting of a versus mode which pits two players against each other in the age old struggle to provide light to starving quantum beings. Players compete to finish stages first, thereby gaining time while at the same time causing their opponent’s time to diminish more quickly. The cooperative multiplayer mode provides each player with half of the puzzle grid. Players can only move the items on their half of the grid, requiring cooperation and communication to get the grid completed.
There’s certainly plenty to do in the game, however the gameplay isn’t engaging enough to keep you interested for long periods of time. Short bursts is the name of the game in this situation. It certainly doesn’t help that the entire game appears to have been created with MS Paint and the music is repetitive to the point of inducing psychosis.
Prism Light the Way has an interesting premise, and there are plenty of gameplay options to choose from, however it doesn’t grab you and make you want to forego the rest of your life for just one more puzzle. 30 bucks may be a bit steep to pay for a game that you only want to play for 10 minutes at a time, however hardcore puzzle addicts who have conquered all other puzzle games on their DS may find enough here to feed their fix.
