Cipher Prime may only be a small studio, but it has a fantastic track record of producing simplistic games that manage to appeal to the masses, whilst also offering up enough addictive qualities to ensnare hardcore gamers, keeping them coming back for more – as seen with Auditorium. Cubed3 recently took a closer look at Splice, a puzzle game unlike any other, on the PlayStation 4, and even enjoyed its soundtrack – Flight of the Angels – so much that it received a review as part of the MusiCube line. With this being a cross-platform release, it is time to take another look, now on PlayStation 3. Is the originality of Splice enough?
Splice is a minimalistic puzzle game. It doesn't have much in the way of tutorials or explanations – instead, it simply drops gamers right into the fray. Cells, represented by rounded oblongs, can be picked up and “spliced” into a new area, with the goal being to rearrange them into pre-designed, tidy-looking shapes. Some of these cells feature different abilities, like duplicating or deleting the ones attached to them.
Splice might be a little too minimalistic, though. Most of the puzzle is in figuring out what cells will do once they are placed, and while the game's design and flow are unique and original, in the end they boil down mostly to a system of increasingly difficult trial-and-error episodes. It's rarely clear what's going to happen until it happens, and with no tutorial, help, or heads-up display, what could have been a chess-like game of precision and forethought more often ends up as a frustrating series of stabs in the dark.
