Out of Line

First of all, thanks to the developers for providing a demo. I suggest giving it a try if the art looks interesting since you can. That being said, I expected more from the game. IIRC, the demo is about 1/3 of the game. It also doesn't really get better or more difficult (other than one more difficult puzzle), just a bit different (although there is some slightly different reuse of earlier levels at the end as well). The full game took me about 3 hours to get through (I'm usually slow), mostly because of the pointlessly long animations and slow walking (it feels like a less than 2 hour game fluffed up to 3 hours). I didn't find a few of the blue cubes; usually I am a completionist but I don't think I will play this one again. Technically it worked fairly well for me, although I twice got stuck and needed to go to the main menu to get unstuck (at least one of them was due to not respawning when needed and neither lost progress). The one thing I liked was the cooperation between characters. I've seen a bit of this in other games but this is the first one I can think of where most of the game you are working with another character (you only control your character). This doesn't really add much to the puzzles themselves but I appreciate the feel of the journey being a team effort. Unfortunately the story isn't interesting or even coherent enough for that to have much effect. The artwork is decent but all very similar. Music is generic. I can't recommend the game at any price; it seems like a lesson in why experience matters in game design. There is a game which does what I think this game is aiming for quite well: Creaks. I also enjoyed Little Bug, NyxQuest, and RiME that feel like they have some similarities.

Nice and fun mechanics, superb art and music. Amazing world in which a little boy is inmersed. Very rich details. Nice characters. The bad thing is it's short, I wanted moooore. Still, don't let that restrain you to live this amazing experience of a game.

So I just finished Out Of Line (OOL) which I do own on GOG but chose to play on the Nintendo Switch. It's a fairly standard 2D-platformer with puzzles where you play as San, a small character armed with a spear that you can throw in an arc and nail to walls and other places to solve puzzles. The spear can be used to create platforms for San to jump on but also to trigger buttons and jam the cogs of different machinery and, later in the game, to use as a lever to manipulate machinery in the more intricate puzzles that the game introduces. OOL is, to summarize it as fairly as I can, a game that would probably be considered an indie darling had it been released about a decade earlier when games like Limbo, Fez and Braid recieved praise. OOL isn't nearly as stylish as these three but we have pretty hand drawn visuals, a neat soundtrack and platforming but not much of a story. San is shown being chased by huge machine claws that give of shrieking noices and then by spiders but again: there isn't much of a story besides escaping the dangers and moving on. The game is fairly fun but it's nothing that hasn't been done before. OOL is a bit bland. Not a bad game but not a great one either and if you've played any other puzzle platformer this is familiar territory. You never get tired with the gaming mechanics due to clever pacing and OOL is over in a couple (as in: two) hours and I consider that to be an adequate lenght: the developer deserves credit for not extending the game beyond what the gameplay can carry.

it's a short "puzzle plattformer" and you can see pretty much what you get from the screenshots of this game.