Developer: Moondrop

Publisher: Modus Games

Opposites attract – and sometimes repel – in this beautiful fairy tale come to life.

A fire nymph named Ember wakes up in the hollowed-out tree that is her home. She’s alone. Sensing danger, she wanders out, and realizes that the fire that sustains her world is dying.

In a castle not too far away, an ice warrior named Rime also wakes up alone and confused. He wanders out, and realizes that the world of ice in which he grew up seems to slowly be melting.

The two encounter each other on a wooden bridge. They lock eyes and it’s love at first sight, but there’s a big problem: a magical barrier separates them and their respective worlds. They can see and talk to each other, but they can’t touch. Overcoming this barrier becomes their mutual goal and the objective of the game.

Solving the Riddle

Degrees of Separation is all about solving puzzles by using the unique abilities of the two characters. Rime freezes everything he touches, which, among other things, enables him to walk on water. Ember can heat up lanterns (causing platforms to move) and activate heat jets (which serve as makeshift catapults). Together, they can solve puzzles that neither would be able to alone.

Collecting Scarves

The game is broken down into five main areas, with an abandoned castle serving as the hub. Doors within the castle lead to the hub worlds, and magical scarves act as the keys.

Once you collect enough scarves, another door in the castle opens; notches above each door let you know how many scarves you need to collect. It’s the tried-and-true design first popularized by Super Mario 64 more than two decades ago.

Puzzle Design

A puzzle game lives and dies by its puzzles, and the riddles in this game are really well-designed.

When you enter a puzzle area, the camera zooms out and frames the entire puzzle. Everything you need to solve the puzzle and get the scarf is visible on-screen.

The difficulty of the puzzles varies. Some are easy; some seem easy until you walk through a potential solution and realize you’re a step short; and some leave you scratching your head, wondering where to even begin. They all have one thing in common however: the solutions seem obvious after you’ve figured them out. That’s a hallmark of good puzzle design. There’s nothing here that requires a strategy guide or questionable leaps in logic.

You don’t have to solve every puzzle, either, although I tried to get every scarf that I found. I ultimately skipped just two. The first, I skipped because it looked as if it could only be obtained through two-player co-op. The second, I skipped because I already had enough scarves to open the final door and was in a hurry to see the end of the game.

Stages

The areas are separated into sections that mirror the various stages of a relationship, not all of them happy. My favorite of these is the mines, where if Ember and Rime get too close to each other, it triggers an explosion that sends them both flying to opposite ends of the screen. It’s a neat metaphor for the arguments that eventually befall every couple.

A later stage gives the pair the ability to see things through each other’s eyes. And the final stage (appropriately called “The Solution”) is far more realistic than your average fairytale.

Pretty Pictures

I first played this game as a closed beta on Steam and was stunned by how gorgeous it looked on my computer screen. I was happy to find that it looked just as good on my Switch. Vibrant colors and multiple parallax backgrounds look as if they were lifted out of a children’s book, and I loved the contrast between the worlds of fire and ice.

The characters themselves look like 2-D puppets that were animated in Adobe After Effects. 2-D puppetry is a tricky business; it’s all too easy to make characters look like stiff paper dolls. Moondrop, however, did a good job with the animation, making Ember and Rime feel like real characters instead of artificial, two-dimensional puppets.

Sterling Sound

Sound design is where this game really shines. Wistful piano music comprises much of the game’s soundtrack, and when the music stops, ambient wildlife sounds fill the player’s headphones. Sounds like rushing water and chirping birds do a great job of making the areas feel alive.

Ember and Rime don’t have any lines (other than a few words in their make-believe language), All the speaking parts go to narrator Kira Buckland. Buckland is best-known for voicing killer android 2B in NieR:Automata. Here, she is tasked with relaying Ember and Rime’s emotions, the world’s back story, and intermittent puzzle clues. She does a great job of enhancing the drama without sounding cheesy.

Not Quite Perfect

I really liked this game, but there were a few things keeping it from a higher score.

My first complaint is the lack of a map. This isn’t a metroidvania, but there are branching paths, and a marking system would have been helpful so that I could find my way back to puzzles that I had skipped.

I wasn’t a fan of the save system either. Any time you turn off the game, you start back up at the castle. Warp gates placed throughout the levels make traveling easy, but I would have liked to be able to start at the gates themselves instead of wasting time zipping from gate to gate. I wound up just putting the game in sleep mode so that I wouldn’t lose my place in the game.

I would have liked a scarf counter so that I could have known how many scarves I was missing. It would have created an incentive to play the game beyond the ending. Puzzle games tend to have very little replay value, since you only need to solve a puzzle once to know the solution forever. An option to 100% the game would have extended play time for a bit.

I would have liked to re-map the buttons. A is jump and B is the action button, which is the reverse of how it is in most platformers. I messed up more than a few puzzles by instinctively pressing B to jump instead of A. This wasn’t a show-stopper, but re-mapping would have been a welcome feature.

My biggest complaint, however, was the finale. The final puzzle features a very anticlimactic confrontation. As for the ending…let’s just say that you have two options, and I wasn’t thrilled with either of them.

These flaws aren’t gamebreakers; this is still a really good game. But they do keep it from being a great game.

For couples?

This game features local co-op play, and the pre-launch marketing campaign heavily played up the romance aspect. Launch day was Valentine’s Day, and a call went out to streamer couples who might be interested in streaming the game. I thought it was a great marketing strategy, until I actually played the game.

The problem is, some of these puzzles are real hair-pullers. More than once I wanted to bang my head against the wall in frustration as attempt after attempt to solve a puzzle failed. It felt like the kind of game that would inspire far more yelling than it did hugging. Keep this in mind if you’re planning on playing this game with your significant other.

Overall

Degrees of Separation isn’t perfect, but it’s still one of the most unique puzzle games I’ve ever played and a definite candidate for puzzle game of the year. If you’re looking for a puzzle game to add to your Switch collection, this game is a no-brainer.

Therefore, I give Degrees’s of Seperation by Moondrop my rating of

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