Those moments of frustration, acute though they are, disappear as soon as the puzzle is solved, leaving you to return to the calm that pervades the rest of the game. Everything from the vibrant low-poly scenery and peaceful musical score to the colourful visual design of the puzzle boxes themselves feeds into a near-constant state of serenity in The Pillar. Neither option is particularly satisfying, but brute force can be especially tiresome.Īnd yet, that frustration tends to be short-lived. You either just brute force your way through by watching the demo over and over again memorising the patterns by rote, or you keep a notepad handy so you can quickly scribble down the patterns and use that as a reference. That’s all well and good if your memory is up to the challenge, but if not-mine sure isn’t-there isn’t really any way to solve these. These are where The Pillar can get frustrating, with the later iterations of this puzzle often asking you to memorise three or four different patterns in a row, each one relatively complex and displayed only briefly, and then reproduce them all flawlessly.
#The pillar puzzle escape series#
Other puzzles are less about logical problem-solving and more about memory: the puzzle box will quickly show you a series of patterns being drawn across the grid, which you then have to re-create. Such puzzles never get especially challenging-though The Pillar draws clear inspiration from The Witness, it’s far from being as devious-but they’re satisfying to solve all the same. Some mark a starting point, from which you have to draw a continuous line through all the remaining squares, again without any overlapping, and with some squares blocked out to make the solution trickier to find. Some have you trying to draw links between pairs of like-coloured squares, so that the whole grid gets filled in without any overlapping. There are a few different varieties, but they tie in to a common theme of filling in blocks on a grid to form specific patterns. Those puzzle boxes are the main attraction in The Pillar, making up the majority of the puzzles you’re faced with and also delivering the most interesting brain-teasers to solve.
#The pillar puzzle escape how to#
Figuring out how to summon all the pillars in each area and solve all their puzzle boxes is the key to making your way through The Pillar. Dotted around each new area are tall, red obelisks-the titular pillars-with a puzzle box or two on each side, and still more pillars hide beneath stone pedestals, waiting to be unearthed as you solve other environmental puzzles. The Pillar sees you travelling through a series of serene, brightly-coloured environments, solving a series of puzzles in order to open gates blocking the way forward. The Pillar: Puzzle Escape is a good example of that, with a variety of puzzles that range from satisfying to downright infuriating, but a meditative setting that keeps the frustration to a minimum. The design of the puzzle obviously contributes most to that, but the right setting and atmosphere can create a relaxing experience out of even the most obtuse puzzles. The line between a soothing, relaxing puzzle game is often a thin one.