Anomaly 1729

My first few minutes in Phiohm had me genuinely leaning forward. You drop into a blue-tinted geometric world as Ano, a newly conscious android, and the text on the walls is pure alien cipher - unreadable symbols that only resolve into language as you find and absorb scattered data fragments across the levels. That mechanic alone, the paced decoding of a secret language that gradually makes the world legible, is quietly brilliant. It is the kind of handcrafted, patient idea that makes me want to champion a small studio. Anvil Drop built something with real intent here, and that intent is visible even when the execution stumbles. The core loop is a third-person gravity-manipulation puzzle. Ano carries a dual-mode arm cannon: blue projectiles activate gravity wells that pull you toward surfaces, orange ones trigger repulsion pads that launch you away. You fire at nodes scattered across each room to rotate the entire chamber around its axis, shift floating platforms into new positions, and eventually align the exit door to the correct orientation so it turns green and lets you pass. When all of this clicks - when you mentally map a room, rotate it in stages, ride a jump pad to a ceiling that is now a floor, and hear that door slide open - the satisfaction is real and clean. The puzzle logic has a spatial elegance that rewarded me every time I stopped fighting it. The problems are structural and they compound each other. The rooms are dominated by a single blue-grey palette that makes navigation genuinely disorienting in the worst way: not the atmospheric, intentional disorientation of a good puzzle, but the tedious kind where identical corridors blur together and there is no map, no room numbering, no breadcrumb system to orient yourself. Rooms have no identity. If you misfire and scramble a room's state, there is no reset button - you have to manually reverse every shot, which in complex late-game chambers becomes an exhausting exercise in undoing your own work. The fixed third-person camera sits too close to Ano's back, which makes platforming jumps harder to judge than they should be, and the soundtrack loops into near-silence after a while, losing whatever ambient tension it was building. Across three hub areas - the blue square-block zone, a cyan pentagon section, and a blood-red final area with ability-draining fields - the game does introduce new ideas incrementally, but the visual sameness across all three dulls the sense of progression. For a certain kind of puzzle-head, the one who genuinely enjoys rotating objects in their mind and can tolerate a slow, undirected search through loosely connected chambers, there is a real game here worth excavating. The language-decoding system alone carries a quiet magic I rarely see in this tier of indie release. But the technical roughness, the absent room-reset option, the monotone environments, and the near-total lack of navigational guidance will exhaust most players before the payoff arrives. With a Metacritic score sitting at 49 and only a handful of Steam user reviews on record, the community verdict has landed closer to frustration than celebration. Go in with eyes open and patience stocked, or skip it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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