Rating:

Line Patterns is an excellent puzzle game that plays a little like turn-based Snake. The simple and addictive gameplay, together with the psychedelic tessellation of the line patterns you create, makes a great game betrayed only by poor user interface design.

Full Review

Line Patterns is a game created by Erik Leppen for the Experimental Gameplay Project's April theme of Repeat. To play the game, the player presses the arrow keys on the keyboard to determine the direction in which to expand a pattern of lines. The same direction cannot be repeated consecutively, and 60% of the area must be covered by the pattern in order to unlock the next level. The player will be unable to proceed if the direction he or she has chosen is already occupied by a line that has been created before (hence the similarity with Snake), but the [backspace] key can be used to undo previous actions as far as the start of the level.

Gameplay-wise, this game is brilliant in its simplicity and intuitiveness. Once I began to expand the pattern, I knew I would get in trouble soon - snake-style - when I saw surrounding puzzles replicating my actions and taking up space I could otherwise use to grow my pattern. I spent no time at all learning the game and getting into the meat of the puzzles presented to me once I started playing the game, but the real problem with the game is getting it to start.

The interface that the game packages itself in is very confusing. I had no idea the first screen was a level select screen because there was little indication of that. It was just a black screen with several alphanumeric characters strewn around in random places, seemingly in order, but not making any sense to a new player. It did ask me to press [F1] for some advice, which I did, but the instructions that pressing "letters" allowed me to select a level didn't immediately offer any help. It was only by randomly pressing alphabets on the keyboard that I managed to get into the first level of the game.

After you achieved the target 60% of level covered by your pattern, there is no celebration of your victory, or even an indication of whether your win was recognized or not. The game just continued to play on without the slightest feedback that a new level has been unlocked. I eventually got stuck and pressed [Esc] to return to the level select, which, to my surprise, actually looked like a level select screen now with 2 selectable levels. And then, it all made sense from there.

The game could have been improved by having all the locked levels visible at once on the level select screen, but greyed out to show they aren't currently selectable. This will make sense of pressing "letters" to select a level because there will be a visible list of running letters to reference. There should also be an in-game popup or effect that let you know that you have achieved the required goal and that a new level has been unlocked.

However, I still believe this game deserves a 3.5 star rating, because it is truly an entertaining title once you manage to get past its difficult interface, but it definitely could have scored higher. Without further ado, you can download the game at this website.