Membrane from Perfect Hat is an interesting puzzle platformer in which there’s always more than one solution to each puzzle. Learn more about it in our Membrane review!
In Membrane, you are tasked with completing 45 stage, each presented as a single-screen puzzle room. Why? Because you are playing inside of a person’s body, and you need to complete all stages to send a signal from the brain all the way to the arm and hand of said individual so that it can slap an annoying insect. To fo this, you will control a weird-looking yellow being, going from the brain to the ear to the face and beyond.
For this you will move around with the left analog stick, jump with the B button, use the L and R buttons to lockdown to aim, and use the X and Y buttons to shoot. The Y button allows you to shoot red squares which can stick to walls (as long as they’re not covered in a white material) or to other red blocks you’ve already shot. The X button fires yellow triangles which can change red squares into yellow squares which refill your shoot gauge.
Every stage has an entrance and an exit, and reaching the exit is the only major rule you need to adhere to. There’s always more than one solution to each puzzle, so odds are the way you approach a puzzle might be different to the way I approach a puzzle. Each stage also has two yellow glowing energy orbs you can collect before reaching an exit, but they’re sometimes in hard to reach spots or close to hazards that can instantly kill you.
You can certainly focus on only completing each stage by reaching the exit, and you can also take on grabbing one of the yellow energy orbs in one run while focusing on getting the other one in a different run, which will change how you approach each particular challenge. But if you do go ahead and try to get all the glowing energy orbs, you will be rewarded with three extra mini-games under the Bonus option on the game’s main menu: Catapult, Trickshot & Boulderball.
There are 45 levels in total, which should take you a handful of hours to 100% based on how good you are with puzzle/platformers and how long you take to find each of the many potential solutions to each challenge you will face. Things start off easy enough, but as you progress you will run into spikes that can break your block structures, spinning platforms that will usually drop you into acid, giant spheres that need to be used to destroy walls, pits from which you can’t get out (thus forcing you to reset the stage by pressing the ZL and ZR buttons at the same time), and more.
Membrane is a clever and fun puzzle/platformer with a weird premise that serves as an interesting setup for a short but amusing game you can enjoy at home or on the go on Nintendo Switch that you should definitely check out.
Disclaimer
This Membrane review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Perfect Hat.
