Glass Masquerade – Review
Glass Masquerade is a gorgeous stained glass jigsaw puzzle game, published and developed by indie developer Onyx Lute. In this game you will complete beautiful and colorful art deco style stained glass clock-faces. Jigsaw games are often digital versions of normal jigsaw puzzles, but Glass Masquerade has an unique stained glass style which makes the puzzle pieces have complex shapes and makes this game look and feel very different.
Story
Glass Masquerade is a jigsaw game styled around a world art exhibition, with 25 countries represented on a map. You are welcomed at the ‘International Times Exhibition’ when you start the game, and soon you will discover this exhibition is indeed all about time. It’s a show of artwork of the different countries, all around the world. As a player you’ll have to complete a mosaic to reveal the artwork of the country, and after that you can travel toward another connected country on the map, to complete the next artwork. The background story fits the game well, and exploring the map feels adventurous, even though things are being kept simple.
Graphics
The graphics of Glass Masquerade are very beautiful. The entire game is in a nice and colorful art-deco style with steampunk-like elements and the images you’ll have to complete are mosaics made from stained glass, placed on a clock face. Said pictures are intricate and colorful and there is a tiffany-like clouded pattern in the glass which moves. The images you complete are fitting for the country they represent, as for example, Sweden has Viking art, Japan has a dancing geisha, Portugal has a frigate and so on.
The use of color in Glass Masquerade is great and every art-piece is simply gorgeous. Background colors differ depending on the coloration of the artwork, resulting in a more clear playing field. The clock face of the puzzle has styled hands which move around while you play, and every time you place a piece correctly the hands skip forward. Your in-game screen has bronze cog-like elements at the corners, which continuously spin around in a slow fashion and speed up whenever you place a piece correctly. It’s clear that even with the rather ‘static’ topic of the game, the developers did everything they could to make this title feel very vibrant and alive, as even smaller details, such as the world map, still show a bit of movement.
You’ll quickly notice that the mosaic pieces are outlined by a bronze border, which makes the pieces look slightly bigger than they are, so the exact shape and fit is not instantly recognizable. This makes the puzzle a bit more challenging, but as soon as you move the piece to the correct location it instantly becomes clear whether it fits or not.
Sounds
Glass Masquerade has a great soundtrack with its beautiful ethereal and relaxing music. The world map has a separate theme from the puzzles themselves, and the puzzle theme has five variations based on the type of country the puzzle represents, not counting the separate tunes for the menu and the credits. The music loops after about two to three minutes, but even with the frequent recurrence of the same themes, the music is very relaxing.
Gameplay
As you start the jigsaw puzzle game Glass Masquerade, you will see a world map with several marked countries. Each of these countries has an artwork you can complete.The markings on the countries bear a question mark if you haven’t solved the puzzle yet, and bear a symbol from the puzzle after you completed it. When starting the puzzle of a specific country you will start off with a blank clock face and a lot of slowly rotating black puzzle pieces in intricate shapes situated around the clock face, in two rings; which you can move around. A puzzle has about 25 to 50 pieces, depending on the difficulty level. As soon as you pick up one of the puzzle pieces it will turn itself around, revealing its image, and it will situate itself in the right orientation, which means you do not have to rotate the pieces yourself. The stained glass mosaic style works really well for a jigsaw challenge as the pieces are not instantly recognizable and they have complex shapes.
The main window of the game is a world map you can move around to see the different counties and the paths connecting the countries. As you solve the puzzle in one country, several connected countries are unlocked on the world map and are now available to complete the puzzle.
The art exhibition is called the International Times Exhibition, and not only do you work on clocks, the puzzles are also timed. It takes about seven to fifteen minutes to complete one puzzle, making the total playtime of this game just a few hours. You can improve your completion time by replaying the puzzle of any country. If you complete a puzzle the completed image will appear at the bottom of the world map, and you can view it in full size when clicked. As just stated, you can always re-visit one of the countries to finish the puzzle again, even when you know the image it will still be a challenge because the singular pieces of colored glass are quite abstract by themselves. If you wish to make things trickier, to add even more replay value, you can also opt to disable the red-colored pieces you’d usually get at the beginning of a puzzle, that would grant you an easier start.
The only downside to this game is that it is quite short thus more puzzles or even a sequel would be nice to see. It would also be fun to have more challenging puzzles, like a huge stained glass artwork with a great number of pieces, or simply adjustable difficulty options that could have perhaps split up the existing puzzle pieces into even smaller bits, to increase the longevity of all of the present puzzles in such a fashion. Even a mode where you needed to rotate each piece yourselves could have added a lot of replay value. Nonetheless, this would probably make the game less relaxing to play. The current setup of the game makes it great to finish a puzzle whenever you feel like it, without frustration without too many hurdles to overcome.
Conclusion
Glass masquerade is beautiful to look at and has a great soundtrack. It’s very relaxing to play and it does not get boring as it’s fun to see the image slowly emerge as you assemble the mosaic. In short this quirky, original puzzle game has a great combination of picturesque artwork, relaxing music and simple, yet great gameplay mechanics, without a high difficulty thus making the game accessible for every type of gamer. If you like jigsaw puzzles then Glass masquerade is a great title to buy at steam, it’s not expensive and it feels like time well spent.
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