Puzzles for Clef review

A noteworthy puzzler thanks to its gorgeous artwork, charming world and finely tuned brain-teasing challenges

In today's complicated world, it's maybe no surprise that cosy is making a comeback. Sometimes you're up for mould-breaking plots, head-scratching puzzles, and lashings of post-apocalyptic realism, but some days you just want to relax into a beautiful world, having your brain gently tickled as you wander to the strains of a soothing soundtrack. And if today’s that day, Puzzles for Clef is here for you. As its title suggests, the debut offering from Ukrainian developers Weasel Token presents a generous helping of loosely linked conundrums created simply as a present for the eponymous Clef, an anthropomorphic teenage rabbit in a pretty summer dress. It's every bit as cute as it sounds, and – a few rough edges aside – it offers a charmingly offbeat world packed with a nice variety of classic puzzle types. Its challenges may not break any new ground, but the lovely graphics, chill soundtrack and endearing interactions between Clef and everyone she meets make for a delightful experience.

Otium Island is a remarkable place. Verdant and varied, it is home to both anthropomorphic animals and animal automata, from Hans the heron painter to Tobal, a sleeping mechanical dragon. Clef’s family were a pivotal part of island life for generations until her father had to leave under tragic circumstances that you'll slowly uncover. Clef and her elder sister Cres are both curious and more than slightly puzzle-obsessed, and today is Clef's birthday. That means it's time for not just cake and a party, but also a very special treasure hunt, organised by Cres and designed to introduce Clef to her island heritage.

That's because Clef's grandfather was the last Bell Keeper, the custodian of ten enormous bells scattered around the island that served to both orient its mechanical denizens and delight its other residents. Without anyone to look after them, the bells are slowly falling into a sad state of disrepair, and Cres (with typical big sisterly cunning) has decided to turn fixing them into a game for her younger sibling. She's also hidden crucial parts, messed with machinery, and even painted the world's worst painting, all in the name of challenging and intriguing her sister. Fortunately she's also left a series of clues, in the form of sweetly encouraging letters.

Before you go thinking this is just the world's most adorable Myst clone, though, we'd better talk about the magic Conducting Wand. This helps Clef to play one of four seasonal melodies, which can reveal hidden objects and create tame fireballs, among other things. Cres won't admit it's magic, saying merely that it helps to control the Otium's systems, but it sure does smell like magic. This sense of the fantastical pervades the island, starting with its intricate mythology. According to the local stories, day and night began as black and white cats chasing each other across the sky, cats who ended in a frozen embrace to become the Moon. Legend also tells of dragons, birds whose love and Phoenix-like internal fire led them to become the Sun, and wolves who cried crystal tears. Indeed, crystals are crucial to life on the island, as they provide the power, warmth, and light that the wand controls. Each type has its own season, and some are grown like plants in a giant Crystal Orangerie, tended by Tove the tortoise.

Puzzles for Clef bubbles with charm, starting with its graphics and music. Presented in layered 2D, the intricately hand-drawn scenes, with their soft shading, pastel palette and slightly wobbly edges, feel like they belong in a children's storybook. Clef herself stands out thanks to her crisp outlines and smooth animation; seeing her long ears bouncing as she skipped and bounded around always put a smile on my face. The music, too, is gently orchestral and nicely varied, ranging from tinkling piano melodies to oboes and strings. The result is incredibly cosy and relaxing, helping you to chill out and focus on the latest puzzle without distraction.

Each bell has its own zone with distinct visual and puzzle styles. You (as Clef) start out in the Bamboo Forest, with its leafy cherry trees, Chinese lanterns and pagodas, ascending high up into the clock-obsessed Time Tower and Sky Castle and down into the Crystal Mines and the Underground Library. Along the way, you'll have to assemble an automaton cast in the Musical Salon and navigate the fiendish Rose Maze (which isn't so much a maze as an outsized sliding puzzle packed with additional puzzles). These areas are generally large and open, with Clef able to scamper left and right, as well as hopping up and down stairs and bounding from platform to platform. This is still very much a puzzle game, though, and Clef's no Lara Croft: you won't find any tricky timed jumps off moving platforms or other gymnastics here.

Everything is handled with keyboard or controller, from Clef's movement to manipulating the many puzzle mechanisms she finds. The main interface is very straightforward: just use/talk, cancel, move, and jump. Although Clef does occasionally find objects she needs, there's no inventory as such, and she can figure out what to do with them without your help. The only oddity is that climbing stairs is handled by pressing up or down and then repeatedly jumping, something that (to my chagrin) the game only explained after I'd gone the wrong way at the start and gotten myself stuck at the top of a ship's mast with seemingly no way down!

This all works fine, but I did wish there was mouse support at times. In particular, several puzzles ask you to shuffle pieces around, and these cry out for the ability to just click and drag them. Instead, you have to navigate from piece to piece, select the one you want to move, shuffle it into position, and deselect it again. The Wand has you playing melodies using the first four number keys as a mini musical keyboard, with the notes themselves rippling along as coloured symbols on a staff above your head. (Controllers instead use the left and right triggers and shoulder buttons by default, which never felt natural to me. Thankfully, the controls can be re-mapped.) You do have to approach casting spells like playing a song, in that pausing can mean you have to restart, but tunes are seldom more than six notes long and most people shouldn't have an issue.

Puzzles for Clef

Genre:	Fantasy
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Side-scroller
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Puzzle-platformer
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Long (more than 10 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium

Clef has a journal-cum-scrapbook that she gradually fills in with Cres's letters, items she finds, notes about nearby puzzles, and her thoughts about the people and places of Otium Island. There are charming watercolour paintings, pressed flowers, and the occasional joke about the strange old day she's having. As well as being a beautiful object in itself, the journal is great for keeping track of everything that's happened and the information you need to solve each challenge. That said, it does occasionally miss crucial details and, because it opens to fill the screen, you can't refer to it while you're actually solving a puzzle, meaning I still wound up making a few notes.

The puzzles themselves run the gamut from logical to mechanical, mixing standalone tasks with ones that push you to explore the environment to find items or information. One moment you'll be sliding blocks out of the way of a light beam or arranging pipes to fix a heating system, and the next you'll be trying to decipher clues to the combination of a symbolic lock. There are deduction puzzles, math puzzles, and guess-the-pattern puzzles. You'll be counting rocks, drawing stellar constellations, and tending rare flowers. You’ll also have to discover a few unique magical melodies, but doing so will take a good eye rather than a good ear: they’re always spelled out using distinctive coloured symbols, not playing in the background.

The puzzles are generally fair and fun, varying in difficulty, often making you think but rarely stumping you for long. When I did get stuck, I was either overthinking it or had missed a crucial clue. There are enough sisterly hints to point you in the right direction, although a couple had hints that only really made sense (to me, at least) in retrospect, and one or two require a fair bit of scampering back and forth. There's also an unfortunate bug that replaces a crucial letter with random dialogue if you don't pick up certain objects before you know you need them. That said, with so much to get your teeth into, there was bound to be an occasional speed bump, and it's nothing that couldn't be fixed in a future update.

If I have a criticism, it's that the Conducting Wand and its spells are a little under-used, or at least are only used in fairly obvious ways, such as revealing hidden objects or lighting candles. Indeed, you only break out the last of the four seasonal melodies a handful of times. As part of a wider variety of puzzles, this is fine, but having come up with such a cute idea, I’d have liked to see the developers compose a few more variations on these main themes.

Given that the whole quest is framed as a treasure hunt, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Clef spends a fair amount of time tracking down groups of objects, ranging from crystals to flowers to ladder rungs. Some are just waiting in the open for her to find, while others are magically hidden and can only be uncovered with the help of hints or pictures from Cres. Having an excuse to ramble through such lovely environments is no bad thing, but with so much space to search and no hotspot highlighter, I did manage to miss the odd item and wound up wandering frustratedly in circles a couple of times. Especially because a few of them are in hidden areas you can only reach by seemingly walking through walls!

The world is packed with such spots. Walls or hedges close to the camera are shown in silhouette, and the only way to know whether Clef will walk into them or behind them into a new area is to try, meaning I developed a (probably hilarious to anyone watching) habit of bumping into everything I saw in the hope of finding something cool. There are secret laboratories, neat viewpoints, and illicit passageways aplenty, all with something interesting for dedicated players to collect or see. There are tokens and jingle bells, not to mention a choir of mechanical birds and a series of mysterious chests that don't do anything right now but hint at the developers' future plans to expand the game.

If that isn't enough, Tove sends you on an optional quest to plant flowers on special crystals, and you can track down lost books for the moth librarian. There's so much to go back for, in fact, that you're eventually given access to a series of portals (or "rabbit holes") back to earlier zones, and you can keep on searching even once you've completed the main hunt and had your cake. Completists should note, though, that the game doesn’t track how well you’re doing, aside from achievements for finding every token and bell in the game that (I suspect) will be quite challenging to obtain.

If (as I did) you dive in and try to see and do everything, there's easily fifteen hours of playtime here, roaming a magical world and meeting curious characters. Beret-wearing Hans is obsessed with beauty, the colour blue, and the saxophone, while Lord Reuel (a weasel with a crush on Cres) is a mandolin-playing romantic, and engineer Percival is all steampunk goggles and melancholic longing for better times. Even though Clef spends most of her time alone, these interactions and her sister's letters mean you never feel lonely, and they gently lead her to the real reason why she has to set the island’s ten bells ringing again.

Final Verdict

Puzzles for Clef is utterly darling and adorable, not perfect but hard not to love. With its enchanting cartoon graphics backed by a gentle orchestral soundtrack, its tricky but not too tricky puzzles, and its whimsical but carefully realised world, playing it is like returning to simpler, sunnier times. The controls can be a little awkward and the occasional clue may fly over your head, but none of that matters too much when you're roaming such a fantastical place and meeting such curious characters. For anyone in need of a pick-me-up and a little mental massage, taking a trip to Otium Island to spend some time with Clef and her friends could be the ideal antidote to the stresses of modern life.

Peter played Puzzles for Clef on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.