Parallel Experiment

I have a soft spot for games that make communication the mechanic, not just the flavour text, and Parallel Experiment earns that love almost immediately. Polish indie studio Eleven Puzzles built their Cryptic Killer series on exactly this idea, and their third entry is the most ambitious version of it yet: two players, two completely separate screens, one shared catastrophe to solve. The setup is pure noir. Detectives Ally and Old Dog are hunting a serial killer across Krakow when they become his unwilling test subjects. The story leans into supernatural and psychological territory, told through nearly 100 hand-illustrated comic book panels between levels. The comic book art direction is the real standout visually: atmospheric, moody, and full of dark-corner detail that makes the city feel lived-in and dangerous. Voice acting is present and mostly solid, though the accent mixing can feel jarring mid-line, and the narrative itself occasionally grows convoluted by the final act. It is, honestly, a backdrop more than a driver. Most players will find themselves far more gripped by the puzzle architecture than by the plot beats. And the puzzles are where this thing sings. Each player holds half the information needed to solve every challenge, which forces constant verbal negotiation: redirecting water flows, soldering circuits, cracking old-school ciphers, decoding surveillance footage, even passing tools through a hidden drawer to fix a Morse-code lightbulb machine. The asymmetric design means neither player can coast. A cooperative dialogue system lets you jointly interrogate NPCs, with responses shifting based on what both players say, which is a clever wrinkle that makes conversations feel like puzzles in their own right. The in-game pen-and-notebook system lets each player scribble notes directly onto their screen, a small thing that becomes indispensable fast. There is also a genuinely funny "annoy your partner" mechanic that lets you poke their screen or shake their camera, which sounds trivial but lands perfectly as a pressure valve during tougher sections. Optional secret tokens unlock extra mini-games at the bar hub, including darts, Three in a Row, and a Claw Machine, all given cooperative twists. The weaknesses are real and worth knowing. The segments where both detectives share the same screen rather than operating in separate rooms remove the asymmetric tension that is the game's core strength, and some critics noted these shared puzzles allow one player to simply carry the other without meaningful collaboration. Movement in the side-scrolling and top-down sections is slow, and executing solutions you have already mentally solved can feel like wading through wet cement. A handful of bugs at launch, including a frozen Match-3 slot game and interaction glitches with levers, required lobby restarts for some players. Eleven Puzzles has a stated commitment to incorporating player feedback into patches, so patch cadence will matter here. The game is strictly co-op only, no single-player option exists, and you will need an external voice channel like Discord or Zoom running alongside it since in-game voice chat is not built in. For the right pair, though, this is a rare thing: a small studio game that knows exactly what it is, builds every system toward that one feeling, and sticks the landing more often than not. Prior Cryptic Killer entries are not required, the game works as a standalone. A Nintendo Switch version is also in the works if you have a couch partner waiting.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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