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Nomori Review
I’ve always had a deep admiration for designers of puzzle games. There’s something about a puzzle that lays the designer’s work totally bare to the player’s senses. Sure, these games might still come with the trappings of a story or some gorgeous visuals, but at the end of the day, a puzzle game invites you to see past the siren’s call of characterization and narrative until all that’s left are math and angles.
That invitation is a double-edged sword, though. The math underneath had better be airtight. The architecture beneath has to be beautiful enough to warrant the attention. Otherwise, there might be a lot less left to see than you hoped.
Publisher: Enchanted Works Developer: Enchanted Works Platform: Played on PC (Steam) Availability: Released on September 23, on PC (Steam), Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. |
I’ll not bury the lede any longer: Nomori is the new portal-based spatial puzzler from Dutch developers Enchanted Works, and while its bright world and intriguing levels sometimes gesture towards a better game still waiting to bloom, the challenges it offers players are simply too loosely put together to justify putting up with its painfully thin homage to Ghibli-esque whimsy.
The premise of Nomori, such as it is, revolves around helping a young girl named Kiko return home to her grandmother from a folkloric spirit world. The exact circumstances of Kiko’s arrival to the world of Nomori are inconsequential — we know this because the game is uninterested in sparing more than a few lines of shoulder-shrugging dialogue to explain it — but all that stands between her and her grandmother’s house is a topsy-turvy sequence of forty-ish season-themed levels that would make M.C. Escher reach for his dramamine.
Kiko's characterization, as well as that of her newfound spirit friends, is shockingly slight. These are caricatures at best and the bare memory of a conversation at worst, better left aside than dwelled on. The amateur nature of Nomori’s visual language is at first disarming, but when paired with its confusingly unstable framerate and frustrating camera, whatever charm might have been there at first sours after a few hours of play. Bright and saccharine, Nomori features world-building-as-set-dressing; it practically begs you to see through the twee to the aforementioned math and angles underneath.
Some small talk from one of Nomori's denizens
Fortunately, this is where Nomori shines brightest, for a little while at least. Each season of puzzles features ten levels where you must guide Kiko from point A to point B, and every level is a fiendish little bundle of dizzying terrain where your destination often lies perpendicular or even opposite your starting orientation. Imagine solving a 3D puzzle box, but instead of holding it in your hands, you wander its surface, passing through various portals to reorient up and down at will.
As you pass through each successive season, Nomori layers on complexity by adding more and more tools to the toolkit. Blocks that are initially only good for sticking in gaps for you to jump across gain all kinds of attributes that modulate their utility. You can make them bigger or smaller, make them bouncy, use them like a key to open doors, and even shuttle them forward and backward in time. Likewise, the portals that link different parts of each level together are fixed in place, acting like a passive doorway through which Kiko can step.
But as the game progresses, Kiko gains the ability to rotate the portals — and the world you see within them — relative to your own stance, which opens up a whole new range of spatial puzzling possibilities. held within them. Eventually, Kiko can even place the portals herself within a scattering of empty portal frames strewn across later levels. All of this ensures that by the game’s final hours, I usually could feel a pleasing crunch between my ears as I kept track of all these different pieces.
For the most part, these modulations are the only lever the folks at Enchanted Works ever pull to up the puzzling ante. The level designs and the solutions I needed to find in order to traverse them largely fail to keep up with the expanding toolkit in either cleverness or crunch. These later levels, as a result, are somewhat less than the sum of their parts. Often, Nomori felt like an overly difficult march through a series of rushed tutorials where I was rewarded more for spamming the newest addition to Kiko’s repertoire than for creative, thoughtful experimentation.
Part of that feeling comes from Nomori’s DNA as a physics-based puzzler. Navigating its world occasionally requires pretty precise platforming, not to mention carefully planned box-placement across multiple axes and gravitational pulls. That precision is routinely at odds with the level design, which simultaneously feels too open and too fussy. Similarly, Kiko’s momentum never feels quite right, with the platforming somehow feeling both slippery and stodgy. The flat, Xbox 360-era textures and generally repetitive visual language of each level make parsing the terrain a bit of a headache, as well. The result of all this is an experience where I think I completed the levels almost by accident about 20% of the time.
And the thing is, I see the vision. There is something to be said for simply handing players a tangle of environments they can find all kinds of ways to navigate. And occasionally, Nomori delivers on that promise, letting me hop into the final portal at an absurd angle that’s hard to imagine the designers ever intended. But I frequently just bumbled my way through, never having that aha! moment even after having gotten to the other side. The math and the angles of it all feel too wobbly, like a dial with too much play or a faucet you have to jiggle to shut off. And without a character to love, a world to explore, or a quest to pull me along, I’m afraid Nomori can’t stand up to scrutiny against its many excellent peers within the genre.
Verdict  |
Image Credits: Jordan Wood and Enchanted Works Disclosure: We received a free copy of this title from the publisher.
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