Grade: B-
Relaxing, minimalist puzzle game where objects slowly come into focus.
Created by Bold Brush Studios, Affinity has 26 puzzle levels and takes a couple of hours to play. Each level comprises parts of an object that are completely fragmented on the game canvas. You move all of the oddly shaped pieces around and click them together. After putting the fragments together, the payoff is that you see the object comes into focus. Often, you don’t know what you’re building until you’ve almost solved it. Affinity is relaxing, has an excellent ambient soundtrack, but has a couple of missed issues in the game build.
Relaxing ambience was successful
The objects that were fragmented were a lot of everyday things. There was a banana, a flower, a landscape, people, an ostrich. My favorite level was the panda bear. The developers wanted to get across that each everyday object can be broken apart into a complex and interesting set of details.
As you moved pieces around, you heard small Tibetan chimes ring out. The soundscape provided a pleasant backdrop to the gameplay. It was certainly relaxing.
My only difficulty in the game itself was that the color contrast in some of the levels made it hard to see the pieces.
Game build had some issues
Affinity unpacks at a whopping 5 GB of game data. The large size was curious, as I’ve played more expansive puzzle games that came in a significantly smaller package. I looked in the game files, and it seems like the level assets took up the vast majority of the space. I’m not sure how exactly Bold Brush games created the level asset files, but a two-hour minimalistic puzzle taking 5GB of game data seems poorly optimized.
In addition to the large file size, there’s a bug with the screen resolution that impacted gameplay. If you’re on a wide-screen resolution, 1920×1200, then the puzzle pieces can lay out of your ability to see them, which is a hard stop on finishing the game. Switching to 1920×1080 fixed the issue, but I was lucky to guess what might fix it intuitively.
Overall impression
I enjoyed my time solving the puzzles in Affinity. The game build itself, something that should be invisible to most game players, was unfortunately front and center. This became a distraction from what was otherwise a successful venture by Bold Brush Studios.
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