Out of all the games on display at the Yorkshire Games Fest, ongoing project Umwelt perhaps taxed our brain the most. ‘Umwelt’ itself is a working title from Cupboard Games whose meaning — an individual’s perceptual reality — does a good job defining the central concept of the game. This is the act of solving puzzles through the experience of different perspectives.
Wait, slow down. What’s that supposed to mean?
Well, one of the first things you see in Umwelt is your own brain sat in front of a television screen. Through that screen you can see a room, and you can switch between these two views at the press of a button. You’re very much left to your own devices here, wandering through a locked room in search of clues. We had to be pointed in the direction of the first perception filter, but soon got the hang of it after that.
Perception filters, or chips as we’re calling them, are the way to change how your brain interfaces with reality and can be found around the building as small circuit boards. When in the brain view, you can plug these chips in to one hemisphere of your brain. When we played the demo, one side was dedicated to vision-related chips, the other to sound. You can only have one chip plugged into each side at a time.
Our first few chips were quite straightforward. Colour filters, each blocking all but a certain colour, let us find wavelength-specific clues hidden around the room. With these, we could escape into the building proper, wandering into a maze of corridors which was to be our source of intrigue for the rest of the demo.
The fact that you have to switch through these different chips or filters means that you have to keep tidbits of information in mind as you swap them over. It’s a non-linear approach to puzzle solving which presents quite a challenge, but an interesting one. A large amount of our experiment-fuelled wanderings were more to satisfy curiosity and ‘what happens if I use this to look at this?’ than actually trying to solve things.
As fun as we found it, we’re not amazing with puzzles and the room was a bit too loud to hear properly through our headphones, so we ended up stuck on a sound-related puzzle, but we went away loving Umwelt’s concept. We haven’t seen anything quite like it before — curious, engaging and challenging, we think it’s a great watch for anyone in search of a tough, novel mystery. We hope we’ll be able to follow it from this early stage in development, seeing how its enigma unravels along the way.
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