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Everything starts out pretty simply as the game does a fine job of walking you through its mechanics one element at a time. You have no direct ability to manipulate anything in the space beyond rotating the cubes that you find yourself in. When you walk into a wall (or any vertical surface) what was the wall will rotate and become the floor. Once you get used to this early levels tend to be pretty easy but once things get rolling the challenge begins to set in. Moving blocks, electrified fields, meandering sets of metal platforms… they’ll all slowly get combined in different ways to test your ingenuity and problem-solving in new ways. After a while the challenge will tend to be to your spatial skills and being able to reverse-engineer not only where you need to go but how as trying to do things like position blocks in a certain way can take some planning. While the perspective could be viewed as merely a gimmick it actually works quite well, though at times your movement and which way is down can get confusing if you move too quickly. I struggled initially with moving and looking around because I made the mistake of thinking it was free movement like you’d have in something like an adventure. You instead move more on a grid and can then look around from that pivot point. Using the D-Pad and the shoulder buttons is an alternative and more digital control option but once I understood the analog controls I still preferred them. In the end you’ll either embrace what Neverout is looking to offer with its more than 60 levels of first-person puzzling or you won’t. I can absolutely say that I’ve never played anything quite like it in general, let alone on the Switch, and though there are levels I was able to pretty easily work through there were others that gave me pause. Working through some solutions takes some trial and error as you work out how everything needs to be arranged but completing those levels then tends to be quite satisfying. If you can deal with the odd controls, and would like a new perspective on puzzling (literally), Neverout is a welcome change of pace.
Justin Nation, Score:Good [7.5]