Disoriented, against my expectations, turned out to be a minor masterpiece. A platformer that plays on a fear of heights (combined with dizziness), that at times requires very careful jumping, and constantly shifts gravity such that pretty much any surface you see will become important at some point. It's also a tricky puzzler, with elements such as switches that rotate given surfaces to help lead you elsewhere, buttons that change the environment from light to dark to reveal hidden parts and delete other ones, twisting surfaces that take you to unexpected places, and teleporters that take you to the other end of the map.
The difficulty in the game lies with keeping track of which areas each button changes, and making sure you do them all in the right order (getting the teleporters facing the right way at the right time is a particular challenge). The only objective in each level is to get through a portal or door at the end, but in several levels you will of course have to ensure the portal is rotated the right way, and that you yourself are oriented such that you can walk through it (on one occasion, I solved a puzzle in a different way by falling through the door rather than walking through). To help you, you can assign a key to change the camera in order to view the map from afar, seeing more elements than you would do from first-person, but the game cleverly doesn't let you see all of the level from any one position, so the challenge is always there.
The game, with its gravity mechanic, might remind you of other games such as Manifold Garden, although in this one, if you fall off the map you are just taken back to where you quicksaved. Be careful, if you do the elements wrongly you may end up in a dead end with no way back to where you need to be, so you'll need to restart the level. Some levels took me just a minute, others took me up to half an hour: the difficulty curve is unpredictable on your first playthrough.
Given its price, Disoriented is well worth a look and carves its own niche in the puzzle games category. If you're scared of heights, be thankful it's just a videogame! If you don't like platformers, this may not be for you, but puzzle fans will enjoy the concept, solid execution and worthy challenge.
