Glass Masquerade
Title: Glass Masquerade (Origins)
Developer: Onyx Lute
Publisher: Digerati Distribution
Website: https://glass-masquerade.com/
Genre: Puzzle
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Audience: 3+
Release Date: 08/02/2019
Price: £10.79 – Rapid Reviews UK was very kindly provided with a review code for this title.
What the Developers say
Welcome to Glass Masquerade – an artistic puzzle game inspired by Art Deco & stained glass artisans of the 20th century. You need to combine hidden glass pieces to unveil clocks and themes exhibited by various cultures of the world at the ‘International Times Exhibition’ – an interactive electronic show.
25 countries attending:
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, Mongolia, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Tanzania, USA
All exhibits have been carefully crafted for your eyes’ joy and pleasure – don’t just pass by!
https://glass-masquerade.com/
Introduction
Glass Masquerade is a stylistic Jigsaw Puzzle game that makes you feel like you have stepped into a 1920s art deco museum with beautifully designed Stained-Glass Windows at your disposal. This game is said to be a Relaxing Puzzle Game, let’s see how much “Ommmm” I can achieve and not “Ummm…”?
Looks and Sounds
Visually, the game looks gorgeous, especially if you are a fan of Steam Punk or Art Deco. The finished artwork looks detailed, and the beautiful flickering of light animated through the clock faces and turning gears makes this game look so very stylish. Even the sounds are very well placed, with a satisfying sound of glass tinkling like wind chimes and a soothing soundtrack by composer Nikita Sevalnev.
Gameplay and Replayability
There are 25 unique jigsaws, each crafted to represent a different country of the world to reconstruct in the frame of a ticking clock, but there are no limits on the stage or penalties for placing pieces in incorrect locations. You can take a piece of the puzzle, and it will automatically rotate to the correct position, and you drop it anywhere in the frame. If it’s not the correct location, it just simply jumps back with all other pieces, if however, you have sleuthed out where a piece fits it will slot into place with a satisfying glass click.
That being said, it is not as simple as grabbing any piece and randomly dropping it into the frame hoping to guess the right location of every piece correctly. Even when I know where a piece of the puzzle goes, it sometimes feels as if I have to be very close to near perfect to fix the puzzle piece into place.
It was very convenient that you can use both touch screen controls and joy con controls without having to change any setting, meaning that if you felt that the Joy-Con controls were feeling too slow, you can quickly hold a piece and move it swiftly with your finger across the screen.
The game starts very easy with the first location, France. On completing this puzzle with the Hint Fragments activated (some highlighted pieces at the start that have markers to find the correct position quicker) I managed a time of 7.47, after a lot more exposure with the game I went back to the first location and completed the same puzzle with Hint Fragments off in a time of 5.08. Wow, Am I getting smarter?
A thing to note from this is that only the fastest completed time is displayed, there isn’t a way to retrieve past times to see your progress.As more locations open on the map screen the difficulty gets progressively harder, Mexico had me stumped for a while, so moved onto another puzzle. When I finally got the courage to jump back into Mexico, it was nice to see that the pieces I managed to place on my first attempt were still in place, but there is no way to wipe the progression and start from scratch.
Conclusion
I started feeling like I was Indiana Jones, fitting together these incomplete masterpieces to reveal the final artwork, then moving along the map to the next location in the world and completing another masterpiece for the ‘International Times Exhibition’.But it feels like this game has no real achievements, besides maybe going back to a puzzle you’ve completed and trying to beat your previous time, I feel hardcore gamers are going to be disappointed.
If you enjoy Jigsaw Puzzles but hate finding out three pieces are missing, this is what you want on your Switch. Glass Masquerade takes your mind off of your daily stresses and helps you zone out and relax. Much better than a colouring book on a long commute.
Rapid Reviews UK Rating
You can purchase Glass Masquerade on the Nintendo eShop on the following link, https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Glass-Masquerade-1505834.html
