Samsara (PC)
Depending on the specific theology or philosophy you refer to, Samsara is a word with many different meanings. For the most part, across ideologies like Buddhism and Jainism, it seems to refer to the cycle of rebirth, the soul moving across realms as part of the repeating cycle of life and death, with the toils of this process receiving special emphasis. The indie puzzle platformer Samsara by Marker Limited uses the name but does not seem to directly be invoking rebirth, although an interpretive lens could certainly twist it into that shape with enough work. Instead, Samsara seems to instead be the name of the game’s setting, but in this game with very few scenes that never feature any text, it feels like attempting to read too much into the name is not the intention of the game designers.
The adventure begins for a young girl named Zee when she spots a squirrel while playing in the park. Quickly pursuing the little critter, it leads her to a strange glowing gateway that Zee steps into without trepidation. Flung into an ethereal realm, Zee finds that her every action is mirrored in a separate dimension below her, the view like a reflection in the pond. As she starts to use the two dimensions to her advantage to move into more gates and search for a way out though, she’s eventually joined by a shadowy duplicate of herself who also seems on a similar path to finding an escape. The two then must work together to ensure each one has a safe exit to the current puzzle, the tools involved growing more diverse as the game continues on.
Very little information about this set-up is communicated in game and is instead found in other places like the online store pages where you can buy Samsara, but this plot doesn’t seem to be trying to say or do much despite its mysteriously chosen name. Instead, it has a heavy focus on the puzzle layouts, but it does at least pay a good deal attention to the backgrounds for the different parts of Samsara you travel to. While Zee herself has some unusual proportions with a large round head and a thin long body, the backgrounds are devoted to crisp detail with surreal alterations to natural settings. One of the first worlds is a simple green forest, but the reflection below turns it to a withered blue remnant of a place once filled with life. A seemingly normal suburban neighborhood has its buildings become run down domiciles in its dark counterpart, the lights from windows reddened and strange plants crawling across the man-made surfaces. The deeper you go, the stranger things will get, with a tropical world waiting near the end where both sides contain floating eyeballs who watch Zee’s motions, but at the same time, it never becomes so foreboding as to be scary. One world features a theme park in the background where you can see people eagerly riding a haunted house dark ride, and another visit to an urban environment has UFOs drop in and abduct things as cute background details. Thematic and sometimes rather pretty, these dichotomous areas help carry forward the mystery of this wordless adventure as you struggle to find your way home.
When it comes to how you play Samsara, you only really need a mouse. Each level has at least one exit gate positioned somewhere, many including a second exit once Shadow Zee is introduced to the action early on. The moment you click Zee or Shadow Zee, they’ll both start running forward in the direction they’re facing. The girls can’t jump, climb, or really interact with the world in any way save to run across surfaces they can reach. Since you are never given a straight path to the goal, you must instead make it, each level giving you a concise and carefully selected set of blocks you need to rotate and place to make a path to the exit. The 2D layouts are often pretty small in size, never really going beyond ten square blocks across and usually keeping below five square blocks tall since it must be reflected on the bottom half of the screen as well to make that an equal ten. This means the play area is reliable in size and the set of blocks you’re given can often have fairly intuitive spots to be placed, but the exact arrangement of them, the rotations required, and how they appear on both sides can influence how you place your puzzle pieces.
Whenever a block is placed in the bottom portion of a level below the glowing dividing line, an identical mirror image will show up in the top portion. This usually means if you have a staircase that goes one way, you can have its direction reversed on the top screen by placing it below. However, if you place it on the top part of the screen, no mirror image will be created, meaning you can influence the movement of the two Zees more carefully on the top half without potentially blocking vital routes they may need to take in the reflected world. Portals can mean the girls will swap sides or end up in new parts of a stage once they run into them, and if they find themselves walking off an edge into thin air, no matter how close the nearby block might be, they’ll plummet to their immediate doom. You must thus construct a perfect path before unleashing these girls to run down your path, and by keeping the amount of blocks involved on your part limited, it helps Samsara avoid becoming too complex for its own good. You’ll never be overwhelmed by the influence you hold on the puzzle because you are only able to use a few tools to solve it, and identifying points where a girl will go tumbling is usually a good start to finding a piece’s proper place.
When the game begins, it mostly just tests your ability to understand the reflection mechanic and other small aspects of block placement. If a wooden block is poorly supported on an edge it will fall off and refuse to work, so you need to make sure your chosen locations are solid ground for the blocks to rest on. Managing both girl’s movements is a decent challenge when things kick off, but some stages are fairly straightforward and the game threatens to be a bit too easy for its own good. It throws in a few early stages that do require really considering your block placement, but soon Samsara begins to grow into a truly interesting puzzler as it allows new gimmicks to seep into the play that was threatening to be a bit too plain. Dark vines are an intriguing mechanic because of how the girls interact with them, Zee’s weight causing them to wither but Shadow Zee can run through the withered plants to restore their shape. This means the vines can serve as temporary barriers, the player able to trap a girl by making her walk back and forth between walls if extra time is needed for one Zee to move into a better position, and vine decay can also influence how blocks are placed. Causing some plants to die will allow blocks placed atop them to drop down, opening up new paths and changing the shape of your puzzle solution.
The vines already add more future-focused thinking than you would otherwise use, but soon, the wooden blocks you started off with are joined by new block types that continue to increase the considerations needed to succeed. What seem like either stone blocks or grey clay blocks come in similar shapes to the wooden ones, stairs and cubes being their most common designs, but the grey blocks interact with the reflection system differently. Wooden blocks are impacted by gravity at all times, meaning if the reflected echo of a wood block has it floating in the air, it will drop down once you’ve placed the real deal. This can mean that some wood blocks can’t be placed in certain locations because they are not allowed to touch Zee, the gates, portals, or be placed inside other blocks. However, to overcome gravity woes, you can place a grey block on a surface below, and the grey block’s counterpart above will hang in space, able to serve as a support for crumbling platforms or just act as bridges that would be otherwise impossible to build.
Gold blocks go for an even stranger design. When you place a gold block on the bottom screen, it has what might be thought of inverted gravity on the top. For example, if a gold block drops one space when you place it in the reflected world, in the normal world it will instead rise up into the air. These hang in space similar to the grey blocks as well, so more floating block shenanigans are possible in your puzzle design solutions. Learning the exact height to drop a gold block from for desired results is important, and the dark vines can alter the game world even more as they move these gold blocks about based on if they’re alive or dead.
Once the game has its different block types, the vines, and teleportation portals, Samsara really begins to whip out some truly challenging designs. Many variables exist to consider including things that can only be influenced indirectly when you’re made to sit back and watch the Zees run across the design you laid out. The limited level size and number of pieces you can place remains relatively reserved despite the tougher puzzles that crop up as you approach the conclusion, and while more of this fairly short experience is probably spent with the mild designs, the speed with which you can complete them helps you reach these legitimate challenges waiting for you in the back half. Seeing your solution pan out in these more difficult levels is quite satisfying because the kid gloves have come off, the game asking for you to really eyeball the opportunities available and suss out what is usually the only possible answer. Some stages do seem to have more than one way to complete them, usually the simpler ones or ones that give you plenty of blocks, but figuring out what you’re meant to do is still a fun gameplay loop even if you’re not given much elbow room to experiment with your own ideas on how things should unfold.
THE VERDICT: Samsara’s short length means its early portions spent with simple puzzle designs threaten to make it feel too plain to entertain, but once it has begun to properly whip out its special block types and concepts like the withering plant platforms it becomes a puzzle game that really stokes the mind. Those later puzzle levels make good use of a small batch of variables you have limited influence on, but the placement and rotation of your blocks still requires smart problem solving to succeed. Lovely backdrops that convey the mirrored worlds of Samsara well bring things together rather nicely, so while it might not be as hearty as other puzzle platformers, it eventually comes together into an entertaining puzzler that does well within the space it has created.
And so, I give Samsara for PC…
A GOOD rating. Samsara hitting about a 3 hour run time does mean the time it spends early on with its easier puzzles does put it on some shaky ground, but once you get out of the game easing you into its central ideas, the gimmicks start rolling in and produce puzzles that are worth engaging with. The reflected worlds make placing a block more than just identifying a single simple use for it. You may need to make sure its reflection is properly placed, or it might need to drop later to open up a new route, or a staircase on one side could assist one Zee in climbing while the other Zee uses the wall on the other side of the block as a surface to run into to turn her around. The block types have just enough potential to them that later levels can really begin to test your problem solving skill, few stages giving up their solutions easily once things like gold blocks begin to toy with the physics even further. The strength of this later portion is pretty much the one leg Samsara is standing on though besides some beautifully drawn backgrounds, so it is in danger of feeling too thin for some players, especially if they buy it at full price. However, for a quick little puzzle platformer that finds some potential for its initially straightforward concept, Samsara does quite well for itself.
Adding some more levels that utilize the increasing quality of Samsara’s puzzle design would help ensure its place as a well put together puzzle platformer, the earlier stages easier to brush over if they weren’t almost as abundant as the ones that show off the game’s strengths better. Samsara does find itself in a good spot when it comes to improvement though, because any game where the main change to make it better would be to just make it longer is doing fairly well with what it has. Adding in some more direct acknowledgement of the story would help as well, but really, Samsara feels like it has a good handle on what makes its particular puzzle solving approach enjoyable and it played to those strengths once it started to explore them. Perhaps the developers wanted to end things before the new gimmicks got old or they didn’t want to start making things too complex, but in its current state, Samsara still packs in enough good levels to assure it earns a positive rating.