The Hell Is This?
LYNE is a neat (and very relaxing) puzzle game originally made for mobile devices by Thomas Bowker, ported to PC on Steam in 2014. You can buy it for your mobile device here, for Android and here, on the Apple store. I first stumbled upon it one time when my old computer was broken and I had to resort to using my phone/tablet for entertainment. In the middle of another session of binge-watching all of Buffy, this little game popped up as a free app of the day on Amazon so I grabbed it out of curiosity.
Several hours later, I put it down. This game is one of the best mobile games I’ve ever played. There’s a wonderful little tactile pleasure in swiping your fingers over some shapes and making serene little dooting sounds. The gameplay is simple enough, with easy to understand and well-telegraphed rules that never change – the difficulty comes from how the game combines the elements of gameplay, not in changing them. But, I’m getting ahead of myself!
How Will This Work?
Lyne has a lot of puzzles. A lot. 650 puzzles in fact, with the next one always being slightly more difficult than the last. They’re arranged into 26 sets of 25 puzzles, one for each letter of the alphabet. This fact was not lost on a lot of people who purchased the game on Steam when they realised that you got an achievement for completing each set. An achievement that had the letter of the set you just completed in the graphic. People use this games’ achievements to spell out things on their steam profile is what I’m getting at here. Sometimes dirty things.
Anyway, each update of this LP will be going through one set of puzzles. The first update is quite short because its the tutorial but they’ll get longer as the puzzles get more difficult and I have to think more about what I’m doing! I’m aiming for very sparse commentary on these ones and I’ve opted for subtitles on the first video so you can enjoy the soothing background sounds of Lyne while I explain mechanics to you. Most updates won’t have any commentary at all and I’m just going to let the puzzles speak for themselves!
Along with the set updates, inspired by my friends Artix and FPzero’s LP of Picross, I will also be posting some homework assignments! Lyne has, ever since its release, released a daily set of puzzles. They’re machine-generated (unlike the puzzles in the main game which are hand-built) so they’re very difficult but they’re fun and always different! I’ll be posting a set of six of these puzzles along with every update, with the solutions posted with the next update!
I think that’s about it! Let’s do some puzzles!
Videos
Update 1 - Set A/Tutorial