[Review] Tetragon - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: Cafundo Estudio Criativo
Published By: Buka Entertainment 
Categories: Platformer, Puzzle 
Release Date: 08.12.21

I’m always open to different kinds of puzzle games, especially puzzle platformers. To me at least, Tetragon is a different kind of puzzle game. Tetragon’s story is quite interesting. Parallel universes, a sacred jewel known as the Tetra-Gen. The world has been peaceful for a long as people remember. Randomly, dark energy was forming, soon creating a terrible monster. The Tetra-Gen can destroy it and send it back, but the opposite happened and the Tetra-Gen was shattered. You’re on a journey to reclaim the broken shards of the Tetra-Gen and bring peace back.

It wouldn’t be quite fair to call Tetragon a puzzle platformer. Yes, there is platforms, but there’s no jumping across them. Instead, Tetragon has you climbing and dropping to each place you need to get to. That’s not all though, stages will require you to manipulate your surroundings to get there. Stone Tablets are placed in certain stages, they allow you to move the stage 90 degrees. Be careful though, you could fall to your death.

There are pillars you’ll need to raise and lower. These are to help you climb up, get across, or drop safely. I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but it’s a bit cumbersome to select these pillars to move. You use the shoulder buttons to highlight them, but this press will always move to another pillar. So if I just need get to just one pillar in particular, this means cycling through the pillars. It’s a tad inconvenient.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled at first, it seemed samey, but this changed as soon as you got your first power up, letting you climb higher. And then after that once you got to the second “world”, with a new, fresh environment, and newer puzzles, I started to warm up to it. I felt that Tetragon purposefully placed the more subdued puzzles early, not to overwhelm players.

Unfortunately, fun that I had was muddled by a few glaring issues. Issues I think can be fixed in an update. The first, is how unresponsive the game feels at times. I’ll press a direction and it’ll both take a bit to move, and then a bit to stop, leading to my plunging death.