Finis Review

Finis is the latest in the line of my growing favourite genre – the first person puzzler. Here though, we’re playing with a twist; as well as solving a procession of puzzles, the game is going to analyse us and deliver a personality description based on the Lüscher color test. While we’re presented with a disclaimer up front (results aren’t obviously a real psychoanalysis etc), and the test itself seems to be one of the more contentious ones out there, I found playing Finis under this guise to be a different, and surprisingly accurate, experience.

We start off by picking a colour from a grid, at which point we’re dropped into one of around two dozen or so scenarios. These scenarios are simple puzzle tests, though the challenge tends to come from the UI and controls rather than the actual tests themselves.

From the off, I was put on the back foot by not being able to invert Y (perhaps this is part of the test…), but there are ways around that. What I am less fond of is the complete lack of explanation on the rest of the controls. There are two different interact options, assigned to half the buttons each, but when actually trying to do something there was no explanation on which of the two to use.

For example, the first puzzle I found myself in was to load a cannon with a ball and fire. I could see all the pieces, and could pick up the metal ingots needed to make the ball, but I couldn’t get it into the smelter. The reticule in the centre of the screen changes when we can interact with something, but too often it stays changed even when we’re no longer looking at the object, or even any object. This led to a lot of grinding against walls and objects to see if anything happened, before accidently discovering the second interact button that opened the smelter.

From there, and through the remaining hour or less it takes to compete a playthrough, it was a case of trying both buttons on every object and hoping, which made interacting carried items with others more tedious than it needed to be. A simple control description in the menu, or even two different context-sensitive prompts would fix this immediately.

Control issues aside, this is a fairly simple, straight-forward puzzle game. Each scenario only takes a few minutes, though again there were a few times I found myself stuck due to the vagueness of the controls for longer than needs be. After the first few tests based on colour, we’re then given a few more puzzles that then combine to give us our overall personality rating.

I wasn’t holding out much hope for this part, but I have to admit, the above screen is actually pretty close to the mark in my eyes. Confirmation bias is a thing, but it’s still a pretty cool way to round out a series of puzzles, and I’d be very interested in seeing the results of my friends and family to see if their result are as close to the mark.

Once we’ve beaten the initial playthrough, we can play again or just go through all of the puzzles in order with no need to worry about being psychoanalyzed by our Xbox. The solutions (as much as I’ve played again) don’t change though.

Conclusion

While including the Lüscher color test is a neat idea and actually quite well implemented (in our eyes at least), there’s no getting over that aside from this USP, Finis is a pretty basic and simple puzzle game, where the main challenge comes from the controls rather than some cleverly designed challenges. Worth a punt if you’re looking for something to give an evening’s puzzle action, but keep expectations low.