Someday an evil corporation is going to figure out the right balance of control versus the illusion of freedom and there’s going to be real trouble. Its unending greed and megalomania will be tempered by a long-term strategy that’s a little more nuanced than the standard “Obey!”, basically the adult version of the kid who always has to win at everything right now. That company will not be Albatross Technologies, though, because its enacted the same stupid policies that always lead to a rebellion: the Haves have and the Have-nots don’t. Every year, though, the Forgotten Ones are granted a chance for a single member to live a better life in Albatown, and this year a promising engineer manages to win the drawing. They may be from the lesser class but they’ve won the right to show their worth, so it’s time to get to tinkering.
A little wire and a lot of logic
The basics ofLinkitoare that you’ve got a handful of components and usually as many wires as you’d like to hook everything together, with the goal being to create a stable output. What that output is can vary from one type of puzzle to the next, whether that be a consistent power source, a set number of small robots marching towards their goal or even a decoded message. These may seem like different things, but really they’re all signal, with the only difference between them being the type of devices needed to get the output to the input.
Starting off it’s all about electric power. Drag a line from supply to goal and that’s it, tutorial victory achieved, but soon different types of switches and splitters start complicating the goal. Yellow circles attached to a switch or other supply are always output, while blue circles on a device are always input, but when you’ve got a cover over an output that needs a power supply to open and only a limited number of sources where that can come from, it soon becomes necessary to start thinking about the order of operations. Power to the input cover, power to the input that’s no longer covered, disconnect the cover because it only needs to be up long enough to plug in a wire, and that’s the lot. Of course, when that logic ends up applying to a metal cover that’s hiding a number of interconnected components, it can require careful thought to get everything just right.
What makes each puzzle work is the variables they come with. A button gives a different effect from a switch, despite both of them supplying power. Flip a switch and it provides power until you un-flip it, while a button only works while it’s held down. The and-gates only transmit when both inputs have power, while or-gates function with either input working and will only transmit with one of its two inputs active. This has a direct effect on how you connect splitters, especially on puzzles that use all types of gates at once. These gates are particularly helpful when the power supply is variable, such as the metronome-like source that only transmits when the pendulum points straight up. Couple that with an inverter, which reverses the input signal, plus a little fancy gate wiring, and you can get a consistent signal through the machine. Toss in more mechanical puzzles like the ones with mini-robots, or the cypher puzzles that require both a code and its number key piped through a different kind of logic gate, and there are nicely tricky puzzles even before the bonus ones come into play.
Even dystopias need electrical engineers
As the puzzles go by, new elements get introduced and the types of puzzles are divided up by the story. As a new worker you’re given simple tasks to start with, but there’s trouble in Albatown and of course you’re in the middle of it. The rise in rank is maybe a little quick, seeing as you go from wiring up a toaster in maintenance to defusing bombs at the rapid response center in just a handful of promotions, but the odds of being just a simple lucky worker plucked from the great unwashed was never particularly high. Each new promotion comes with its own office, where the levels are pinned to the cork board and various reels of microfilm hidden in the background provide a paragraph apiece of flavor text to expand the world. Some of them are surprisingly well hidden, in fact, and it will take digging to turn up everything.
Closing Comments:
Linkito is an incredibly clever puzzle game based on real-world electronics (barring the occasional infinite power source) and it’s smart enough to introduce things slowly so that even the less technically-minded can wrap their heads around each new part. Clearing the story probably won’t take more than eight hours or so, although the bonus puzzles in each area can add another several more hours to that total, but a few bonus puzzles plus a level editor promise to add a significant amount of content ifLinkitofinds its creative community.
The heart of the game, though, is that it just feels good to tinker with electronics, with almost no penalty for experimentation aside from the bomb levels that run on a generous timer. A few hours with its logic and you’ll be putting together intricate machines while prodding at the shape of a solution, hooking up multiple components of varying complexity with only a bit of rewiring when it doesn’t quite go to plan. The dozens of parts and change in puzzle style for each chapter of the story keepLinkitomoving along from start to finish, and it’s hard to stop before every last bit of stray content is fully solved.
Linkito is a sandbox logic game from Kalinarm where you play an engineer working for the Albatross Company. As you solve puzzles you’ll climb the corporate ladder, revealing more of the firm’s secrets.
