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It can be difficult to find the time to complete a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week. In our biweekly column Short game we suggest video games that can be started and ended a weekend.
Before you start playing Thumbnails, I was expecting it to look a lot like Gnog, a puzzle game that has turned puzzle boxes into toy-like dioramas. Perhaps it was because the two games share the same colorful aesthetic, centered on an object floating in space. But where Gnog adds a lot to the fun of his riddles by turning them into toys that you can manipulate, thumbnails goes in the opposite direction: it starts as a toy before turning into a puzzle.
The most of thumbnails is based on a visual tour. An object, for example a bowl, is presented to you. By clicking and dragging your mouse or moving your finger on your touch screen, you can rotate it and rotate it as it floated weightlessly in space. If you rotate the bowl so that you look directly at the bowl from above, and then turn it to the opposite, you will be surprised to find that you are no longer rotating a bowl, but a lamp. When you turn the objects, they turn into other objects when their silhouettes are similar. In this case, looking at the top of the bowl is like looking straight down the lamp.
The surprise of seeing an object turn into something else is incredibly fun. You manipulate the objects at random until the novelty disappears, which is about the moment you realize that you continue to see the same objects. That's when the game really start. As you begin to look through the game's menus, you'll find a kind of flowchart showing the item you currently have, then the immediate items it can transform.
Skeleton company
Some of these options are marked as question marks, since you have not seen them yet. So, you come back and start wondering how you could create a different silhouette that could bring you to this new object. From there, things become more complex because accessing new objects does not always mean getting the right shape.
Take the example of the lamp and bowl before: once you are on the lamp, you can not go back to the bowl. If you try, you will get a bulb instead of the bowl and a click on the bulb will change the colors of the object and the background. By returning to the lamp, you will find that there are new objects that you can not get before, because of the color change. This is the simplest example, but some objects are morphing to create new shapes, or you may need to extract the code from one object that will tell you how to unlock another.
Although finding all the objects is actually the end of the game, there are still a lot of puzzles to solve, even if they have a logic that may be a bit more obtuse than the main game. This puzzle solving exploration in thumbnails makes it almost similar to a minimalist adventure game. And like the objects themselves, the game turns into something much more interesting than it was at the beginning.
thumbnails was created by Skeleton Business. You can get it Itch.io or Steam (under Windows or macOS) for $ 7.99, or on Google game or the iOS App Store for $ 2.99. It takes about three hours to finish.
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