I played Splice this week. I gave a non-gamer a list of 3 games and asked her to pick one that sounded the most interesting to her without explaining what the games were about. Splice is another puzzler from Cipher Prime, the makers of Auditorium and Fractal. Unlike Fractal, Splice is more about tricky puzzle solving ala Auditorium. I played through the Sequences but didn’t go through the Epilogue.

I get the feeling that Splice is an experiment for the studio. While Auditorium and Fractal were 2D games, Splice is presented as a 2D game but uses 3D models. The colorful themes and palettes that are common among Cipher Prime’s games are present and the clever uses in which they integrate the puzzles into biological specimen cards is intriguing (aka, the overall aesthetics). I was a little confused during the first few play sessions because there are no guides explaining how certain things work, but rather you are encouraged to play around and learn for yourself.

As a puzzler, the goal is to take a strand of nodes and reshape them into a specific configuration shown as a white outline. Each node can have 0, 1, or 2 children. What makes it difficult is the low number of moves you have to achieve the desired configuration.

There are special nodes, like the splitter which makes a copy of itself and any descendents (child, grandchild, ..) attached to it, or the delete node which deletes itself any children attached to it. These special nodes are triggered outward from the root node, so order does matter. To help visualize which special node will be triggered next, there is a white ring that is centered around the root node. There is no explanation and if I had not been looking up something related to the game, I wouldn’t have figured it out until much later.

Splice is largely a spatial game about how much you can retain in your head – essentially running simulations in your mind. One neat mechanic akin to Braid is the step back and step forward feature so you can literally run through a simulation step by step, then retrace your steps to try a different route. This saves a lot of time – instead of having to start over from the beginning, just rewind to where you want to start from and go from there. It’s also a bit hard to see the actual configuration as a result of moving one subset of nodes to another. For example, if a solution has two children from a node close to the parent and you have only one child on that node, you may not notice that it’s asking for two children until you have played around a little bit. It’s nothing game breaking, but it does make you wish you can lock the single child to one branch help visualize the moves you need to make next rather than holding a mental model at all times.

Along with the color palette and soft-focused backgrounds, Splice is an ambient game. It’s meant to be thoughtful and less about reflex action. The music is calming and helps you relax and/or focus.

At first, I thought the game was fairly short. There are 7 Sequences with 7 strands each, making a total of 49 puzzles. Then, you unlock the Epilogue which is filled with more complex challenges. The Sequences set is more of an introduction to the game and getting you familiar with the different special nodes and what you can do. The Epilogue is for those puzzle solvers who want more–and got it.

Splice is a neat game, but at the moment I’m not one for solving complex puzzles in elegant manners. I have enough problem solving in elegant ways with coding lately. Nonetheless, I do appreciate the designer’s minds and how they work because some of the Sequence puzzles are quite tricky. An extra challenge is to solve the puzzles in less moves than you are offered, obtaining “angelic” status for that puzzle. I would suggest this game to players who need a break from the shmupps, RTS, FPS, RPGs and especially to players who like the intellectual puzzle-solving games as a way to relax and wind down after a hard day.