Prism: Light the Way

I’ve just bought one of those energy-saving light bulbs for my living room lamp. While efficient at what it does, it has its limitations.

It’s fine for illuminating the odd magazine flick-through, but I wouldn’t want to use its dull light for a prolonged reading session. It also takes an absolute age to get going.

All of which is a splendidly appropriate analogy for the colour-matching puzzle play of Prism: Light the Way.

Zattikka’s puzzler sees you manipulating beams of light cast by little green blobs in order to hit their multicoloured companions. The only trouble is, the colour of the light needs to match each blob by the time it hits them.

This is achieved by moving about a pre-selected collection of mirrors, splitters, and prisms that re-route and separate light into constituent shades. Once each blob is illuminated correctly, you move to the next level.

That’s the premise of the main Puzzle mode, which throws a huge number of levels your way. But it takes until around level 27 for the game to get going. It's ridiculously easy until that point and the game would have benefited from chopping out a large chunk of these easy stages.

While Puzzle mode is reasonably fun to play, it simply doesn’t pop out at you in any way. I’ve played similar light-reflecting games before and Prism simply isn’t clever or original enough to stand out.

Infinite and Time modes are predictable variations on Puzzle, but Hyper is a bit different. Here there’s a more action-orientated slant, as you hurry to hit blobs with light beams before they dematerialise.

It’s good that developer Zattikka tried something new here, but sadly Hyper mode is the weakest of the bunch. The game’s engine simply isn’t designed to facilitate fast-paced play, causing it swiftly descend into a clunky mess.

Visually, too, Prism is solid rather than spectacular, possessing a cute if derivative style that calls to mind about a dozen other games simultaneously.

And that's real problem. Prism: Light the Way takes ideas and stylistic cues from numerous sources, and comes away flat and soulless as a result. It’s a nicely pitched, lengthy puzzler, but it’s far from illuminating.