Memorrha Review

To all but the most dedicated puzzle game fans, Memorrha’s premise must sound like a nightmare. You awaken on an island and are greeted at every turn by doors with complex locks that can only be opened with blue orbs, tablets, or light shapes. However, anyone who enjoyed The Witness will like what they see and soon find themselves absorbed from start to finish.

In Memorrha, you must solve increasingly complex puzzles across a mysterious island. You begin in a dark, claustrophobic forest with only a handful of puzzles to solve. These introduce you to the game’s core mechanic; pick up objects and insert them into the correct hole before pressing a button. If you’ve got everything in the right place, energy will flow, a circuit will complete before your eyes, and a door should open.

The game’s pacing feels hand-crafted. You’re required to learn new mechanics by discovering them, but the game will always point you in the right direction. For example, you start out using only blue orbs but need to use tablets quickly. You’re given a hint about using tablets because you get your scanner at the same time, which is then used to help you master every future mechanic.

The game quickly becomes much more once you enter the second biome. You’ll notice walls with shapes in and murals with strange pathways. These all hint at solutions to larger puzzles you can complete in the future, but you need to advance further to get the tools to solve them. Exploration is encouraged because you’ll find locked doors everywhere and then make a connection with them once you unlock their potential solution later on, causing you to backtrack to uncover more of this world’s lore or paths to new puzzles.

However, while the world is densely packed with puzzles that feel organic, as if they emerged from the ground with the rocks beside them, unlocking new biomes and backtracking isn’t that enjoyable. On Switch, the game doesn’t perform that well, with frequent frame drops in large biomes and stuttering to the point of freezing when you first enter or re-enter a biome. While these aren’t game-breaking, they do ruin your immersion and caused me to forget why I was carrying an object so far back a few times.

Despite the technical issues, the game is stunning in its own way. Blue highlights every biome, and the puzzles that decorate the landscape aren’t purely functional, they’re visually striking. Some are, as I’ve mentioned, doors and switches. Others feel like complex circuit boards, pillars scattering an area with lines for you to track and symbols that define how energy travels, all playing into the solution you need to carefully consider.

Early on, Memorrha doesn’t feel as challenging as other puzzle games. After that initial easing-in period, though, you’ll find yourself walking away from puzzles frustrated you can’t solve them in search of something easier. But it never feels insurmountable. There’s always another route for you to take or solutions to try to find. Not all are required for completion, but having a distraction here and there keeps the game feeling fresh until your final furrowed brow disappears.