Normally, an albatross around all our necks would be an obstacle holding us back. In the case of Linkito, the obstacles—at heart, figuring out how to connect wires to operate various machines as with an old-school RadioShack Science Fair Electronic Project Kit—instead lift players out of an alternative 1951’s retro-futuristic dystopia, delivering them from the low-tech Forgotten Lands and into the halls the prestigious Albatross Tech.
With its unique and beautiful-to-look at design, Linkito stands apart from similar story-driven logic puzzlers from Zachtronics and Tomorrow Corporation. However cluttered the workspaces may be, the contraptions strewn across them are easy to grasp and operate, and pulling wires from yellow outputs to blue inputs is more satisfying than a cryptic game of connect the dots has any right to be. Even better is the game’s sense of pacing, which leaps quickly between various era-appropriate technologies (the game’s binary trigger is a literal metronome). Best of all, the analog design spices up familiar coding mechanisms like AND, OR, and XOR gates in much the same way as PS1-style “demakes” provide new perspectives for modern programming.
Not that Linkito dwells on the familiar for all that long. Across the game’s 50 required levels, there’s little sense of déjà vu. Most solutions are unique, making use of whichever combination of the game’s varied delayed signals, temporarily charged batteries, automation stations, and transmitters are available as you turn dials, flip switches, raise power levels, and hold down buttons. The best levels create circuit paths that seem cobbled together but are cheekily deliberate, using the retro setting to hide outside-the-box solutions within (or behind) the clutter of bolted-on panels and LED indicators. (One particularly clever bit requires you to unplug a level’s instructional display so that you can instead power a different set of switches.)
Furthermore, each zone has its own eccentric requirements to master as you—Employee #5678971—work your way up the corporate ladder. Your job relies on completing circuits, plainly presented when you’re just fixing toasters in the Repair division, but you’ll have to figure out how to make the available wiring pilot a drone once you join the ranks of the Robotics team, and you’ll need to transmit not only electrical currents but signal data that you can encrypt or decrypt as a member of Espionage. Between assignments, you can also choose to return to your desk in each zone, clicking to interact with various objects in the environment and seeking out hidden microfilms secreted away by the city’s notorious Hummingbird anarchist “terrorists.”
Throughout Linkito, dialogue from your managers, post-its from your co-workers, and the tasks themselves all work together to gradually paint for players a complete picture of the goings-on at Albatown, which purports to be the only remaining city after the Great War of 1890 but is clearly communicating with outsiders and suppressing its own population. If anything, the game’s perhaps a bit too overt in its writing: “We need at least nine robots,” says one of your managers. “Don’t worry. It’s just like with employees; doesn’t matter if we lose a few.”
Moreover, while it depicts a world that’s openly hostile to its workers, Linkito itself is rather accommodating. Each departmental division of stages (like the tinker-y Laboratory) has a set of required and optional assignments, ensuring that you can complete the game without too much of a challenge, and then there are also big red hint buttons that players can press if they get stuck. If anything, the game is too accommodating as the stakes elevate. In the Intervention center, players are tasked with swiftly defusing time-bombs, but because the game puts so much time on the clock, there never really feels like there’s any pressure.
Where it most matters, though, Linkito delivers engaging puzzles. The final area, Albatross Tech’s Control Center, creatively incorporates elements from each of the previous divisions, with elaborate, multi-panel contraptions that will have you programming robots to carry data that can be used to unlock the path to a bomb. A promising level editor all but ensures there will be even more challenging post-launch devices to solve, for while the story is about a budding revolution, it’s by no means revolutionary. The puzzles, though? They’re electric.
This game was reviewed with code provided by ICO Partners.
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