Filament is out now and might be my favourite puzzle game of 2020

Filament, a stylish narrative puzzle game set aboard a seemingly abandoned spaceship has officially released along with Linux support from Beard Envy and Kasedo Games. Note: Copy provided by GOG.com.

There's barely an introduction as you dock with The Alabaster and have the ship's pilot, Juniper, call out for assistance. Stuck in the cockpit and asking for your help, you're pushed through puzzle after puzzle of mind-bending yet stupidly addictive puzzles as you attempt to find out what happened.

As far as puzzle games go, Filament is seriously sweet and engaging. It has such a friendly feel and atmosphere to it that you won't want to put it down. Mechanically initially quite simple too, accessible with easy controls as the majority of it is just you walking around objects with a wire attached to link everything up but it's also crazy difficult in the later parts.

The truth is out there. Somewhere.

There's been a few of the puzzles where I'm not kidding you, I was stuck on for multiple hours. There's no real sense of failure here though. You can go back to the start of a puzzle quickly, or simply rewind a little at the touch of a button. It handles the complexity of it quite wonderfully. Even though you can't really fail, you still get a great sense of achievement in Filament when you do finally nail-down that puzzle solution. The rush from spending 20 minutes running around and getting tangled up, to then have it suddenly click felt amazing.

Check out the release trailer:

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What certainly helps ease any frustration is not just the simple controls, it's also the multiple paths you can take. You're free to explore each section of the ship a little bit, with different rooms having different sets of puzzles for you to access so you can come back to one later. This is great too, as I mentioned it initially seems simple mechanically but it lures you into gradually more complex features. It's not simple in the later levels. Well, it is, in the sense that you're just running a wire around a ton of puzzles but it tweaks that simplicity constantly.

As you progress you need to deal with: different wire and node colouring, wrapping the wire around a specific node to open a little gateway through a wall to correctly position yourself to wrap it around another, certain nodes needing to be activated in a certain sequence, there's even times you literally need to wrap yourself up in a circle of it all to keep the wire powered. What else? Oh well there's times you're even switching between multiple little robots. So it's easy to have your brain just melt away. So when you're stuck (and you will be), being able to leave and go somewhere else was great.

One odd issue in the Linux version was encountered: it seemed to be unable to detect and load any language so the whole menu was sort-of broken with no text anywhere. A quick re-load and then it was fine. Strange but only happened once. Apart from that, through all my hours of play it was great!

With an initially pretty straightforward puzzle mechanic that just keeps on giving and twisting your brain, a dose of wonderfully atmospheric audio and a soft yet quite beautiful art style, Filament is a puzzle game that's really worthy of your time and monies. Fantastic. Loved it.

You can find Filament on GOG.com, Humble Store and Steam.