I continued the trend of puzzles game right after I played Winterlore. I was scrolling through Steam for some puzzle games and found this week’s game. Return a city to its former glory with the help of robots and the power of light. This week is Amber City.

Amber City is a 2D puzzle game from Irisloft and Gamera Games. The game will release on PC and I have nothing for the release date or retail price.

The player takes the role of a woman in a white dress as she wakes from a long slumber to find a city that has crumbled around her. Use light to reverse time to restore the city to its former glory and ultimately witness what caused the downfall.

Amber City has your standard puzzle-solving mechanics and adds small, unique touches to make them feel fresh, for example, light plays an enormous role in clearing stages. The protagonist is essentially a conduit for light to travel, allowing her to take light and place it in another location. Light runs the city and choosing which light to take and which to use is one of the beginning puzzles. Stringing lights together to connect to an open door panel or even a lift to cross an open area are only a few puzzles that are shown.

Another is taking control of robots to do tasks you could not do yourself. There are two sections dedicated to this mechanic and I have to say that it does add a lot of depth to the game. With the added light mechanic, adding robots to the puzzle mix makes the puzzles quite difficult.

Amber City is one hell of a gorgeous game. I specifically remember downloading it based on its visuals on Steam. Hand-drawn run-down cityscapes still have so much color to them. Everything in this game looks so clean and colorful.

Amber City was a blast. The demo did not run that long, just past thirty minutes, but the gameplay was nothing short of absolute fun. The onboarding puzzles were complex enough to show how the mechanics of the level were going to work and when you entered the next area were introduced to the mechanic in a whole new way. It takes a lot of skill to be able to introduce a new mechanic like that and have it be translated in a fashion that doesn’t anger the player. Amber City will be a solid buy for me when it releases.