Membrane (2018)

Membrane is a polished, tight and smartly designed single-room physics puzzle platformer wrapped around a unique audio/visual retro bubble. We haven’t been so pleasantly surprised with a game of the genre since the initial Wii release of World Of Goo. Despite failing hard to educate anyone on the human nervous system, in either portable mode or sitting in the sofa like the plot’s protagonist playing in on the big screen TV, this game is a surreal trip very much worth embarking. Just remember to humbly thank the next housefly that invades your home for this whole experience… at least before reaching for the daily newspaper or fly swatter.

Membrane is an immensely enjoyable puzzle game filled an increasingly interesting use of it’s simple base mechanics.

Membrane is a delightful title for the Nintendo Switch that offers hours of fun solving increasingly complex puzzles.

Membrane is a physics-based psychedelic puzzle-plaformer that is great fun to play. Offering an interesting mechanic and gameplay that is challenging but never too tough, fans of the genre will be sure to enjoy this one!

Membrane is a game based on puzzles with interesting physics, original mechanics and a unique artistic style. A perfect addition to the long list of puzzle/platform games that the hybrid console has in its eShop, especially oriented to be played on handheld mode.

Overall, I just wasn’t enjoying the game, which is a problem. There’s definitely some inventive puzzling here, but I found the experience more frustrating than fun.

I really hope to see Membrane revisited at some point with a greater focus on making satisfying puzzles and using the mechanics to their fullest extent. As it stands, though, there really isn't much to go on here. Membrane's got great aesthetics and all, but there's nothing to really back it up, and so you wind up going through the game without feeling much like engaging in it. There are fun levels sprinkled throughout, but for the most part, I found myself wondering what the point was, and never wound up finding an answer.

weird game. i like it, but its weird. stumbled upon it on the eShop and I dug the art style.

This game has a p cool art style (you have to see it in motion) and I like that I can create my own solutions to the puzzles. Kind of like World of Goo meets DK 94.

very fun game. Really enjoyed the art style, something fresh and different and the creative element to building and solving puzzles was dope.

nice little physics based puzzle game. In the latter portion of the game the levels become a little confusing as to what to do, generally my solution was to finagle my way to completion. The fact that I picked this up for very little added another point to my score, anything over 10 NZD is not really worth it.

short take: wanted to love it but beyond a surface level found more to hate than love. long take: Membrane looks and sounds great. the simple but vibrant graphics and basic but effective music and sfx give the game a crisp, modern feel. when it comes to gameplay, however, Membrane offers a series of repetitive, shallow puzzles that vary wildly from too easy to blisteringly difficult, exacerbated by imprecise controls, poorly defined mechanics and semi-unpredictable physics. generally speaking, easy puzzles in the early game prepare you for the harder ones later on, but occasionally I found a level that took so much longer to complete than the adjacent puzzles that I was sure I had somehow skipped ahead a section. I'm no stranger to hard games, but in games I truly love, the difficulty ramps more gradually and predictably. In Membrane I'd often suddenly find myself stuck for nearly half an hour after breezing through puzzle after puzzle effortlessly. To make things worse, the source of the sudden challenge was often related to the bad aim controls: when aiming, there is absolutely no nuance to your joystick motion. all aiming is "on" or "off", meaning your target changes at the same speed whether tilting the stick gently or with gusto. This makes precision nigh impossible which becomes a glaring issue whenever a puzzle requires accuracy. the last beef I have here is with the imprecision of the physics engine. a perfect example can be found in a level that requires pressing a switch to launch a big green ball. the ball starts the level moving. if you wait for it to reach a position of rest, theoretically it should launch identically (or at least with minimal variance) every time. instead, I discovered the amount of time I wait after the ball stops moving greatly impacts its response to the launcher. wait half a second and the ball veers far off target; wait two-ish seconds and it's a bullseye. wait three? again, far off target. three and half? off target but in a different direction. the logic behind this escapes me. plenty of other examples of things varying wildly due to seemingly arbitrary factors as well. in summary: Membrane seems like it could have been great but uninspired puzzle design, faulty controls and fallible physics make for a frustrating experience.