saiteron

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.