Imprint-X review

There are a lot of weird games on the App Store, but there isn't quite one that is weird in the way that Imprint-X is. In Imprint-X, you play as a child who is hacking into the minds of people by solving increasingly complicated button-based puzzles. Its bizarre premise is match with a uniquely strange aesthetic and off-beat puzzle design, making for a game that may not be for everyone, despite being clever and well made.

When I say that Imprint-X's puzzles are button-based, some of the game's very first puzzles are literally a flashing button that you must press to solve it. Of course, if this were how every puzzle was designed, things would get boring rather quickly.

Instead, Imprint-X presents players with increasingly complicated platforms that are suspended in space that must be thoughtfully tapped and prodded to open a door to the next level. On any stage, taking too many button presses can result in failure.

Easily the most interesting thing about Imprint-X is just how much of an impactful introduction it makes. It has its own opening cinematic that sets up the whole premise for why you are a child brain-hacker, which involves things like an ancient ruin that unleashes some alien menace that invades people's brains.

For a game that–mechanically–is as straightforward as pressing buttons, Imprint-X goes way out of its way to set up its crazy world, which really helps to make the game a whole lot more interesting than it might otherwise be.

The further you get into Imprint-X, the nuance of its puzzle design starts to reveals itself to be quite tricky. To help with this, the game sort of groups puzzles by type, and tries to start you with an introduction to new mechanics and concepts before ramping up to more complicated versions of them.

While I applaud this design approach, certain types of puzzles in Imprint-X just aren't very fun, while others aren't well communicated. There are a fair share of really solid puzzles in there too, but when there's this kind of inconsistency in a game that's almost purely puzzles, it makes it hard to stick through to a point.

Some of this might have been alleviated if more story or cinematics were doled out as you progress through Imprint-X, but the game unfortunately hangs most of its narrative and stylistic hooks on the opening cinematic and little else.

Imprint-X mainly suffers from appearing more ambitious than it really is. It's a decent enough puzzle game, but it's set in a crazy world that I wanted to explore more of. What it actually is though is a ton of puzzles of varying quality that does very little to capitalize on the world it initially builds.