SOLAS 128

I went in expecting a modest indie time-killer and came out having lost several evenings to what is quietly one of the most cleverly constructed puzzle games on PC. SOLAS 128 is a beam-deflection puzzler built by a single developer, and it treats its one core mechanic - routing pulses of light through grid-based rooms using mirrors - with the same obsessive rigour a grand-strategy designer might apply to a supply chain system. The foundation sounds thin. It is anything but. The structural design is where this game earns its reputation. Each room is a panel in a larger machine, and the light beam you route out of one panel feeds directly into the next. Zoom out at any point and you see the whole interconnected map, a branching grid of chambers that branch into four main paths from a central hub. Completing one section can remove glitches - those patches of noisy colour that block beam paths - and open up routes you passed hours earlier, which means backtracking is a genuine puzzle mechanic rather than busywork. The RGB colour system compounds this: white splits into yellow, cyan, and magenta, which further split into red, green, and blue. When two differently coloured beams collide in sync, they merge colour and - crucially - shoot off at a diagonal, which blows the solution space wide open. Reflector plates that alternate direction each pulse, null beams that cancel whatever they touch, and colour-filter gates that strip specific hues from mixed beams all get introduced at measured intervals. Just as you feel comfortable, the ruleset expands again. That pacing is the game's greatest design achievement. The difficulty curve deserves a honest accounting. The prologue is gentle and teaches through play rather than text or pop-ups, which suits the game's wordless aesthetic and generally works well. But mid-to-late game puzzles can be genuinely punishing, and the hint system - which highlights one or two grid squares where mirrors need to go without explaining what to do with them - will feel insufficient when you are staring at a room with six interdependent light streams and no obvious entry point. Multiple reviewers across the press independently noted going to external guides. That is not a failure of intelligence; it is a fair warning that the back half of the game's 150-plus puzzles demands serious patience. The difficulty is almost always fair by the internal logic, but the game does not always telegraph new mechanics cleanly when it introduces them. On PC, the mouse-and-keyboard controls are the natural home for this game. Picking up and repositioning mirrors feels precise, the zoom-out map view reads clearly on a monitor, and the neon-vector aesthetic against the black background looks crisp at any resolution. The synthwave soundtrack by Jamesy Downie keeps pulses of light locked to the beat, which does more than just look good - it functions as a timing reference when you are calculating how diagonal beams will interact across multiple rooms. The one audio criticism worth flagging is that individual tracks loop for long stretches before the next tonal shift arrives, which can tip from hypnotic into monotonous during a particularly stubborn puzzle session. For players who want depth of interlocking systems, patient logic work, and a genuine sense of building something enormous piece by piece, SOLAS 128 delivers in ways that most puzzlers twice its size do not. Accessibility is also handled thoughtfully: each beam colour is reinforced by a unique glyph shape, and contrast settings exist specifically for colour-blind players - a detail that reflects real design care from a solo developer. Steam users have rated it Very Positive at 95 percent across available reviews, and a BAFTA Scotland win adds credible external validation. Come in with calibrated expectations about the hint system, keep a community guide bookmarked for the genuinely opaque late rooms, and this is a puzzler that will occupy your brain long after the screen goes dark.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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