Review of Blankspace
| Subject | Blankspace |
| By | Helpfulness: 2 Vote: 7publicnuisance on 2021-07-24 |
| Review | Blankspace is very much two games. It is your standard visual novel but it also includes various puzzles to be solved. On the visual novel front it is a very good game. The story and characters are interesting and I was actually surprised where it went with the mystery. I had my own ideas about where Chris and Berle were trapped and why but I was way off the mark and happy to be so. When a story only has two characters the whole game it becomes more imperative to flesh them out and both were given a good amount of detail. There were a good amount of choices you could make throughout and outside of a couple times I was able to go with it where I wanted to. The ending I got could have used more of an epilogue or more detail but the journey there was good in it’s own right. On the puzzle front Blankspace was a mixed bag. Some puzzles I loved, some I hated and some I understood the concept of but have no idea how the developers ended up with the answer they got. One thing I will say regardless is the puzzles are at least varied. There are math puzzles; logic puzzles; inventory puzzles where you must combine items; nothing felt like a retread of itself. I have to say that there were more puzzles I disliked than ones I enjoyed. Some were just not a fit to my preferences or likes while others, as I mentioned, I have no idea why the correct answer was correct. In any case I’ll give the developers points for doing something different for the genre. Some shout outs I’ll give are the initial safe puzzle was well done. The clock puzzle was also well done with the exception that the time would have been easier to read had it been digital. I get that the puzzle would have been perhaps too easy but I had the right logic at hand but ended with the wrong answer simply because I judged the minute hand at the slightly wrong place. The flower puzzle later on figuring out how to make the seeds grow was also a well done puzzle. On the flip side the puzzle where you have to combine words felt like it could have had a better answer, I thought maybe their hair colours were the answer which would have been a cool way to go. The block puzzle in the bathroom also annoyed me to no end but I think that is just not to my liking. The bottle puzzle in the bar was one that I think I understood what they wanted but damned if I know how they came up with the result. The art was well done. With most of the room in whites and greys the times when colour is used it really pops. The music was great as well and helped set the mood. I played Blankspace on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any bugs or spelling errors. The game allows you to save at any time and has 78 save slots. Alt-Tab didn’t work. Game Engine: Ren’Py Graphics API: OpenGL Save System: Manual Game Version Played: 1.11 Disk Space Used: 573 MB GPU Usage: 0-53 % VRAM Usage: 428-712 MB CPU Usage: 1-3 % RAM Usage: 2.0-2.1 GB Overall I enjoyed the story more than the puzzles but the game came away giving me a solid impression of it. There is a demo I recommend trying to see if you like the puzzles. I finished my first play through in 4 hours and 11 minutes. I paid $13.09 CAD for Blankspace and feel that is a fair price. My Score: 7/10 My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.1.5 | Manjaro 21.1.0 | Mate 1.24.3 | Kernel 5.13.4-1-MANJARO |
| 2 points |