Take control of a girl and a golem as you use their abilities together to solve puzzles and restore an abandoned ancient water tower.
Golem
Longbow Games
Price: $14.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
Golem puts you in the shoes of a young girl in a drought-stricken region who encounters a mysterious golem that gives her access to an ancient tower. Your goal is to restore the tower so water will flow again. At first glance, Golem looks like a puzzle platformer, but it actually uses a point-and-click control scheme instead.
You move the girl by clicking an accessible location or an object to interact with, and then she’ll run to that location. A convenient feature lets you fast-forward while characters are in motion, so you don’t need to wait the entire time. When you interact with objects, such as levers, you’ll control the effect with simple motions that almost feel better-suited to a touchscreen than a mouse.
Nevertheless, these simple controls work quite well aside from occasional difficulty if two selectable things are right next to each other. For example, at one point I kept selecting the golem while trying to move to the rope alongside him. Several times, I ran through doors while just trying to select a character. This can cause some frustration, but the controls rarely impede the gameplay. A greater problem is the camera. You can control the camera to look around the level, but if you stay idle for a few seconds, it slowly centers in on the character again. This is good if you’ve lost track of where you were, but annoying if you’re trying to check something in the environment.
The game is split across 10 levels, and the golem evolves every other level. Each form has different abilities. It starts out as a ball that can’t move on its own, but gains different skills with each form. It might seem like a drawback when you lose a previous form’s skills, but each set of levels is designed around the golem form you’ll have with you at the time. Most of the golem’s abilities fit nicely into the game’s structure, so the changing gameplay isn’t a problem. The one exception is an ability you get near the end that allows you to manipulate objects, which is much more awkward and finicky than anything else in the game. Still, you only have to deal with it for two levels.
Golem has minimal storytelling, but it clearly wants you to feel an emotional bond between the girl and the golem. Sadly, that never quite came through for me, since their only interactions outside of puzzle-solving are when the golem evolves.
The puzzles themselves come in two basic forms: navigation and restoring the tower. Since there are certain places only the girl can go and other places only the golem can go, together with switches and levers to help the other character progress, most of the puzzles focus on getting each character from one place to the next. At the same time, you’ll need to repair and restart the ancient machinery, which ranges from pulling certain levers to a rather complex puzzle involving mirrors. Sometimes, it’s as easy as seeing which areas you can access and what interactions you have available, but other puzzles are pretty challenging and require you to study the area to figure out what you have to do. Aside from one puzzle that—while logical—used a mechanic never used elsewhere in the game, even the most challenging puzzles felt fair and satisfying to complete.
The Final Word
Although Golem occasionally gets tedious, it successfully adapts a point-and-click control scheme to a side-scrolling puzzle game. Storytelling isn’t its strong suit, but its numerous challenges should provide an enjoyable experience for puzzle fans.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
