I don’t play many video games, just because of the time involved in them, not due to any lack of interest – I often enjoy them and get very sucked in, and I can lose dozens of hours to a good narrative-based game, almost regardless of genre. Somewhere along the way last year, I heard about a shorter puzzle-based game called Out of Line, and was caught immediately by the novel 2-D art style. I picked it up last week when it was on sale on Steam, and played through the whole thing in a couple of hours this week. I think it’s fantastic, and that shorter play time works so much better for me than a 100-hour game like Elden Ring – even if I might really enjoy the latter game too.
You play as the very cute character San, and must complete a series of tasks as you move left to right through an underground space to try to escape whatever weird situation you’re stuck in. Early in the game, you get a spear, which is the only weapon you’ll own in the game, although you can use it to do a number of things, like severing branches, creating tightropes, or, most often, shooting it into a wall so you can use it to climb. You get a couple of instructions in the game when you encounter a very specific new challenge, but otherwise, you’re left to figure it out on your own, using nothing but the left and right arrow keys and the two mouse/trackpad buttons. You’ll get some help from NPCs along the way, but you nearly always have to do something to ‘earn’ that help.
The majority of the puzzles involve a combination of figuring out what you need to do, usually using your spear, and some difficulty executing it with a combination of mouse clicks and keystrokes, often before something bad happens. When you do fail, you just restart from a point usually just prior to the point of failure, so it’s not that devastating if you can’t do it the first time – I did one task at least eight times before I got it right, and I was annoyed, but I wasn’t driven to give up or think the game is impossible or something. There was also one sequence in the game that I couldn’t figure out, and went to a playthrough video on Youtube to get the first clue.There was another puzzle I did know how to solve, but couldn’t execute, and thought my idea was wrong, so I went to the walkthrough and it turned out I just had to do the steps more quickly. I don’t have a ton of experience with games like this, but that seems like a reasonable ratio, and it’s possible the issue was my inexperience rather than anything with the game.
There’s a story behind the game, but it doesn’t matter much to the game play. You don’t need to know anything of it to play, and getting to the end doesn’t give you a conclusion to the narrative, either. The lack of a prologue, combined with the absence of any sort of tutorial, did mean that I didn’t realize there were certain tasks I could have completed to get to 100%, some of which were as simple as just moving to the left in a new environment to collect a cube before resuming the endless scroll to the right. There are 16 achievements in the game, and I only got 12 of them, so I clearly missed some cues here.
I do recommend Out of Line, based solely on how much I enjoyed the playing experience. It looks incredible, with a unique hand-drawn art style that also made it simple to see the goal for each challenge – crossing a chasm, climbing something, opening a gate, and so on. Some puzzles were very simple, some appropriately difficult, but nothing was impossible, even the one where I had to go online for a tip. I’m not sure if there’s much replay value here; twice might be the limit, once to learn the game, then once to try to do it 100%. The walkthrough I found online only takes about 70-75 minutes all the way through, while my one play probably took me 2.5 to 3 hours of active playing time. For the $5 and change I paid for the game, that’s great value.