Lingo

Official website →

Hours played at review time, across 60 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

Lingo is the first-person word-based puzzle game that combines the puzzle solving methodology of the Witness and the Escherian exploration of Antichamber. The highlight of Lingo is the puzzles and the game excels in the puzzle department. So many puzzles give you an aha moment that every puzzle gamer desires. And these moments come so often as there are hundreds of puzzles in both levels of the game. The early and mid-game are absolutely the highlights of the game as discovering all the rules of the puzzles is the real fun of the game. I have a notebook filled with a dozen pages highlighting all the different rules and notes. While the puzzle designs are mostly all great, but some puzzles solutions are frustrating to come to despite even knowing all of a puzzle’s rules and themes. These puzzles only account for 5% of puzzles but they do make for a frustrating experience. Luckily the game has a small hint system where if you press CAPS LOCK while on a puzzle the game tells you the first letter of the word. I only discovered this many hours into my playthrough and this would have saved so much of my time wasted on struggling to find some of these difficult solutions. I do wish there was an even deeper hint system where you could unlock hints or just be able to get more letters unlocked as on some solutions, I struggled so hard I had to join the Discord to find solutions. There is no great dedicated guide to giving answers as it’s hard to tell exactly where a location of a puzzle is until you have finished the area so better hints in game would make it way more enjoyable for the puzzles that have solutions that are out there. The end game is where a lot of my frustration comes from. The game starts off so open with so many directions to go you feel almost overwhelmed. By the end game I felt like I didn’t know exactly where to go. There are so many areas that I had not explored mostly due to the world design. The Escherian world design starts as being very unique and adds in a lot of mystery to the game but by the end it just becomes a chore and it doesn’t add anything to the puzzles, mostly just adds confusion to the player when exploring. There are certain puzzles in the endgame that make you want to scream because of the level design. There were a couple of orange puzzles hidden behind doors that hindered my progress greatly because I didn’t check an area I had already completed 20 hours earlier again that made me lose my mind. This is one of the instances where I know I needed to do something but I had no idea where to look both due to the location of puzzles and due to the poor level design. The bad level design in the endgame ends up just wasting the players time and gets you hard stuck until you can find someone randomly talking about it in the Discord server. The game has a lot of different rules to parse through but they are all used in unique and interesting ways. The different themes of rooms make for an interesting way to develop certain difficult and long solutions that wouldn’t otherwise be doable without knowing a rooms theme. These puzzles are great and are some of my favorites. The library is an extremely difficult endgame area where there are a number of word solutions that I hadn’t even heard of before. I used a thesaurus and word solver for a lot of these puzzles as they were so hard, but it is understandable for being an endgame area. Though when I knew a solution to some of the puzzles I did pop off a bit. The challenge room was one of my favorites. Much like in The Witness it is a time-based challenge with randomized puzzles. I had a bit of difficulty with some of the puzzles especially the mint ones which require you to remember a solution from a previous level (these are bad), but the satisfaction of completing it was tremendous. The game is excellent and has some excellent puzzles. Discovery is what drives the player to keep going and I kept going till I got every achievement. I do wish the game had some better guides and better hints for getting past the hard stuck points in both the exploration and puzzle solving but this is one of the great puzzle games. 9/10