Rating:

Fault Line is short, beautiful and clever. An example of top notch artistic design, and an excellent way to waste thirty minutes.

Additional Info

Full Review

Fault Line, like most Nitrome games, is really pretty. The main character is colourful and expressive, and the environments are simultaneously whimsical, industrial, and easy to interpret. The game's look never really changes through it's relatively brief play time, but there's a real artistic skill on display here. The rest of the game is a perfectly competent puzzle platformer, but it's the pixel work that's simply exceptional.

What's more, the game involves some seriously crazy level-morphing mechanics, and still manages to look pretty excellent. I'm not sure how they did it. Probably some kind of black magic (though don't quote me on that!).

The central conceit is that you can drag together 'nodes' placed throughout the environment, which snap together and change the level drastically in the process. The player moves through the environment as it appears, in all it's crazy disjointed wonder, with inanimate objects behaving as if nothing has happened. It's a mechanic that can't really be explained in words, but once you've played it it makes perfect sense, and becomes very easy to manipulate.

It's also a mechanic that never really becomes annoying or frustrating since there are plenty of checkpoints, and none of the puzzles are too difficult. The best challenges in the game ask the player to do something clever to the environment to proceed. The worst levels are linear, and can be solved by just jamming the first two nodes you find together.

Aside from a that there's not much to say. It looks great, plays great, has some devilishly clever puzzles, and is pretty short. There are definitely worse ways to spend your time, so why not check it out?