Neverout is an interesting VR title turned into a Nintendo Switch experience that seems to be better suited to handle it. It’s fun, it’s challenging, and it can be a bit frustrating now and then, but it’s still worth checking out, especially at the price point.
I’m pretty sure that Vincenzo Natali would have been proud of Neverout. The game is a claustrophobic puzzle game that requires you to find a way out of a cube you’re in with a limited amount of movement at your disposal, while also watching out for smaller cubes falling on your head. I’m not sure I’ve jumped so high from a game since the release of P.I.. The sound of getting smushed by a cube is alarming, but adds to the game’s intensity. Anyway, Neverout is simple in concept, but gets complicated quickly. Regardless, it is nonetheless impressive for an indie game.
My first experience with Neverout was one of confusion, irritation, and admiration.
The confusion comes from the moment you step into the game and start to slowly understand what the heck is going on. You’re inside a cube and you have to find your way to a door in the floor to progress to the next cube. Sometimes that is easy, sometimes that is difficult — it varies, but is clever with its confusion. To help simplify the gameplay, the controls are easy to pick up on. The player has the ability to crawl up any walls, which will cause a shift in the cube. If you can picture yourself in the latter part of Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling, then you get the concept of movement. It’s methodical, it works, and it’s easy to understand. The game’s controls and what it asks you to focus on doesn’t get in the way of developing a strategy on how to get out of the rooms. As you progress through the game, it starts to add a few challenges. You go from moving a single block around a room to open up the escape hatch, and then shift to things like connecting multiple cubes inside the big cube to form a bridge to the escape hatch. While the gameplay is easy to decipher, the difficulty increases from level to level, which makes the game delightfully challenging.
While you might think the puzzle-solving might be irritating, it’s not the part that frustrated me to no end. The irritating part of the game comes with the controls, which do at times, while simplistic, feel a bit stiff and unforgiving. Climbing around in the cube can feel a bit mechanical at times. I’m not really sure of the exact issue with the controls, I just know as a player that something feels a bit off from the norm. The game is irritating at times because you do seem to fight the movement. It’s not something you can’t overcome to enjoy the game, but it can bring down the full entertainment of the game. For example, if I’m going backwards with the thumbsticks towards a wall, and it shifts where I can climb up that wall, and I want to go to the left or right, it almost feels like you’re not allowed to cross the lines that make up the smaller cube spaces you’re crawling across. There just seems to be some restrictive full freedom of movement with the game. Again, it’s manageable, and certainly not a game breaker by any stretch of the imagination, but it is still irritating. This is my biggest complaint with the game, and it could be the weirdness of the Nintendo Switch’s Joy Cons (I’m not a huge fan) that is causing it. Otherwise, it’s a damn fine puzzle game.
The reason why I admire this game is that developer/publisher Gamedust really made the experience challenging. While the first release of this was in VR, and I couldn’t imagine trying this through the HTC Vive, as I could see major stomach turning happening, the construction of the gameplay of design is nothing short of ingenious. A simple concept of shifting walls within a cube to use another cube (or a set of cubes) to escape to yet another puzzle is sickening fun. How they translated it cleverly to the Switch’s portable format should be praised, as the puzzles do hold up outside of their original intent, and the puzzles work better in short stints rather than massive amounts of gameplay time. It is seamless and possibly improved through the Switch thanks to the portability, though, I will never try out the VR version of this to confirm my assumption.
As for the puzzle portion of the game, it’s really quite clever how they made these cube puzzles progressively different from one another, as well as how they set the difficulty arc. The latter of the two shows that the developer took some time to keep in mind to continually challenge the player, while at the same time not overly frustrating them with tiring puzzles. It takes a solid balance to find an in-between with difficulty and entertainment, and Neverout does a great job with bringing that to the gamer.
In terms of puzzles, they’re impressively constructed and not at all boring to play. They will provide some challenge, so if you’re looking for one, then you’re going to find one. I particularly like the fact that once you get used to one style of puzzle solving and understand what to look for during gameplay, that the game shifts a bit and adds in another component that hasn’t been introduced into the mix. Again, using the above example of the bridge, you go from dealing with a single cube to dealing with multiple cubes to dealing with cubes that form a bridge. It’s progressive, throws in new things to keep the gameplay fresh, and keeps you constantly on your toes. That’s what a puzzle game should do.
Now, all of the above said, the price point ($7.49) is absolutely spot on for the experience. I’m not sure I would pay much more for this game because it is a puzzler and it is more stop/go then continuously going. I found myself playing this game to occupy my time, rather than go into a deep dive for hours. That’s not a knock against the game at all, rather it is something I can lean on to relax and challenge myself, while waiting on other experiences. It’s mobile and casual in a sense. Anyway, the puzzles are short, if you can figure them out, and abundant, but they’re really meant for stop/go gaming. It’s a good price for what you get.
Overall, Neverout is an interesting VR title turned into a Nintendo Switch experience that seems to be better suited to handle it. It’s fun, it’s challenging, and it can be a bit frustrating now and then, but it’s still worth checking out, especially at the price point.
