Lemma

"Parkour Party: The Lemma Struggle Chronicles"

"A Leap Too Far"

Honest Trailer: Die-Lemma – The Dilemma of Dying a LOT in Lemma

Fun little platformer, but the final level design is.... bad. There is a lot of backtracking over the same areas with zero indication of where story-critical equipment is. Only once you have acquired the story-critical material do waypoints appear to guide you to the doorway of the level where the materials will be used. And then you have to figure that level out yourself.

Further confounding this process are the multiple realms in the final level having similar themes to them, but not being connected (A, B, C, but without being labeled). So once you have gotten lost traipsing around between these sub levels, you honestly don't even know where you are anymore and if you're on a new side of the same realm you've been on, or if you're on the B or C version of it. There are conveniently no written guides on the final level, and the video walkthrough I found didn't match up with my gameplay, so there's possibly some randomization to the game, or it has just updated since that video series was made.

TL;DR, I spent more time on the last level pacing back and forth checking every random corner than I did on the entire rest of the game, when the rest of the game was very linear.

Lemma has some fantastic player movement and abilities, the satisfaction of chaining moves together is absolutely delightful. Having a relatively small file size for the game is also commendable! The level designs in the earlier levels are also quite good and fun to sprint through. However, the game's level design and level guidance suffers significantly in the second half of the game, where I was constantly confused as to where to explore next. I strongly suggest playing the first half of the game, and proceeding with the second half (the half where you get a "map" of sorts) only if you want more gameplay/story.

Less restrictive than similar games, e.g. Mirror's Edge or Dying Light, but also a lot more janky (in all the wrong ways). Anything can be brute-forced using platform spawning. Environments are also very boring.

I played this game far more than what is displayed here. I first found this game 10 or so years ago. I bought it again to write this review:
It's awesome - it's also crude and raw - but it's fun and something that I haven't seen since in gaming.
The level design is organic, it doesn't feel designed by a person at all, I view this as a major strength, it is otherworldly.
You are put into an environment that is alien and sometimes hostile to you, but as you play you begin to master and adapt.
You will begin to explore a world in ways you have never done before.

My favorite parts are the huge ice-landscape and the city-like worlds.
Also the ice-landscape has the OST "Frost" which is my favorite one.

The story is not important to enjoy this game

This is one of the games that I will cherish forever

Gameplay progression is very much like Celeste and Portal.
The closest game that feels similarly to this is: Manifold Garden (a puzzle game, where you try to navigate spacely recursive repeated levels in unexpected and seemingly unintuitive ways) so if you played that you will probably like this.

THE GOOD:
I'm not sure why the trailer doesn't showcase this but the main feature of the game is that you extend existing walls/floors by running/sliding along them respectively. You get to create extra geometry to reach higher places - or better yet to connect an "electricity" source to a door or similar. The latter was fun whenever the game focused on it. Sadly it's the only fun I had with it.

THE BAD:
I hate how slow the player is. To make any jump you also need to build some momentum first - so you go from "my grandma can crawl faster than this" to "barely walking speed" at its peak.

Animations are clunky, and the UI is horrible. Honestly the whole game feels a lot like the developer found some "Parkour Assets" on the Unity asset store and dropped them onto DefaultScene. I know it's not the case (it's made with XNA etc) but it just feels so raw and out of place.

The levels are massive in size, and usually you can sorta freestyle your way through them. With your speed so slow it gets very tedious and oftentimes I wished I could just noclip towards my destination.

After the halfway mark the game turns from regular A-to-B levels to a hub of 9 interconnected maps (which gets confusing but sorta manageable), and ends in a massive hub of I think 12 or so maps? The layout is so confusing I've never managed to figure it out despite completing it multiple times to get all endings. You don't know which way the exits are, it takes ages to get to them, and you don't know exactly where they'll take you anyway. Ugh.

TL;DR
I'm surprised to see a big boy price tag on a game this slow, clunky, and boring.
A few levels were fun but most are whatever and the whole second half of the game is a huge confusing mess.

I want to like this game. I really, really want to like this game. I just cannot recommend it.

The game should have ended significantly earlier than it did. The end levels turn into mundane fetch quests with frustrating new mechanics that are explained poorly. The story is bland at best and the amount of work needed to be put into the last level consumes more time than the rest of the game.

The controls are clunky and glitchy, which can be forgiven early on, but only get worse later. Additionally, there are WAY too many things assigned to the Left Shift key. Wall running, climbing, slow motion, and platform spawning are all assigned to the SAME BUTTON. There are a lot of keys on a keyboard, and a mouse button that is never used, it's not like they ran out of options.

I started off hopeful, and ended up being so frustrated by the end that I merely wanted to beat it because I was so close to the end. Once I saw one of the endings (there are 4, and each one will take significant work to see), I closed the game and uninstalled it. Pass this one by.

One of the best games i have ever played. I absolutely love movement-based videogames, and this one has shown to be incredibly well-made, even if the coders deny it. The movement is on point, the lore is also good, the mechanics and controls are perfect and fluid. I did not change one single binding in this game for the whole 13 hours of it and still felt extremely comfortable with the key binds and visual settings like FOV.
Edit: I've played for 30+ hours now. The workshop content is awesome, I even got a few world records!

Lemma almost makes the cut for being a good game, but there are some key parts that let the entire thing down.

Lemma is a parkour game come walking simulator. The minimal story is told through textual snippets found throughout the game, rleaving much of the rest up to the player to explore. When it works, the running, jumping, and sliding on platforms is good fun.

The problems I see are in 3 key areas:

- The shift key is used for nearly every action you can take in the game. That makes it nigh on impossible to play when it unlocks the ability to spawn in platforms.
- The actual spawning in of platforms is poorly explained at the start, and there don't seem to be any clear rules about what makes a platform spawn and stay spawned or just ghost out of existence.
- The "climbing" ability is very jerky. Sometimes when you're very far from grabbable surface, if you press shift the game bumps your chharacter forwards in a very unclean fashion, and pushed you up to the surface, often clipping through the world while doing so.

When the game is just about running, and sliding in simple terrain it works very well, but as the levels get more complex it becomes nightmarish to try and manage.

I was itching one day for a new parkour game, since I had just beaten the two Miror's Edge games, and I fell in love with those. Lemma completely blew me away when I first got it. The game is absolutely gorgeous in my honest opinion. I was really hoping it would last for a veryy long time, but sadly, the game lasted only 5 hours for me. One of the cons of this game is that somtimes it can get so confusing on where you're supposed to go it's ridiculous. But other then that, I truly believe id you're a fan of the Mirror's Edge games, you should give this game a shot, it's very good.

If I wasn't a filthy achievement rentboy, I would not be recommending this game.

Lemma is not one game. It is two.

One of these games is pretty good. Not bad at all. It's a first-person parkour game that has a nice sense of momentum and a neat mechanic that can best be described as Shaun White Skateboarding meets Mirror's Edge - terrain generation by wallrunning or sliding off edges.

"Just don't touch anything."

"I still love her."

The thing about Lemma is that it's one of the only few first-person parkour games out there. In contrast to Mirror's Edge, Lemma is alot more puzzle-based and not a whole lot of running. There's no fighting at all, just parkour and puzzle solving.
Lemma's puzzles are not about how to get from point A to point B. The game has a unique gameplay feature where you as the player can create blocks by rolling/sliding off a cliff, or starting a wall-run on a solid wall and then off into nothingness. You use these blocks to complete circuts, connecting two "wires" together to for example open a door or blow up a wall.

If you're looking for good parkour-only games, then Lemma is for you without a doubt. After milking Mirror's Edge to death, I found this game to milk instead. I strongly recommend this game for fans of Mirror's Edge as well.

I really wish I liked Lemma more. When it clicks, it matches the exhilaration of your parkour game standards. However, some poor and confusing level design saps the fun out of the traversal. Most of Lemma is figuring out what the game is asking you to do or where to go, That's not especially fun.

The parkour feels great and natural for the most part, but is maybe a bit lenient? It's a weird thing to complain about, but there were times when the best course of action was to just continually feather the left trigger. Partway through the game, you gain an ability that lets you spawn 'phantom' objects in the environment. This ability felt quite extraneous and is never consistent enough to be used strategically. What you can do is just spam left and right triggers and the ability will push you up in the air constantly to the point where any movement around the levels is trivial. It's the type of addition that's rarely useful in the puzzle solving and almost feels detrimental to the core gameplay.

A couple of times over the duration of Lemma, you're chucked into semi-open areas and basically left to your own devices. It's never really clear what general direction you're meant to be heading in. You'd think a parkour game that just let you explore the world would be fantastic but it just feels aimless and frustrating. Given that the game occasionally explicitly points you at where you need to be going with waypoints, it feels haphazard and inconsistent,

Graphically, it's perfectly fine. The developers get a lot of mileage out of its 'voxel' aesthetic and I think it works well enough. The sound design and music are solid and help the game's alien atmosphere.

I'm quite divided on the inclusion of enemies. I think their abstract design is great but they're not all that fun to manoeuvre around and just recall similar frustrations in other parkour platforming games.

I didn't find the story particularly engaging. That said, I didn't find all of the notes so maybe it takes on more meaning with additional contet. When the game asked me to make a moral decision, it never really felt earned or all that important and I kind of just did whatever. Then the game ended and I felt pretty unsatisfied.

There's a solid base in Lemma, it just feels so overwhelmingly unpolished and unfocused that I find it hard to recommend at $15. Maybe on sale if you're into parkour?

This game is intriguing. Some levels are fascinating. Such as the Dark scene, the Building scene... Control is solid (I think it's better than mirrors edge). Idea is awesome and innovative. Puzzles are interesting. But as a parkour game, I think, there are too many, maybe. However, some puzzles masterly combined with parkour element. They make this game really enjoyable.

In this game you are free to explore. This is quite good but sometimes you may get lost and miss the purpose. When you encounter these issues, it's a little bit frustrating : ( (And so far, I'm still confused about the fuction of additional brick. When you press Shift, the shadow of the brick will appear, but how does it really work?) But this is a interesting game and definitely worth to play.

this is a beautiful game and i am obsest with it i love the art the action tho it is very difficult but the good out ways the bad by a landslide

This game is almost excellent. The story is obtuse and forces you to hunt for hidden notes if you want even a chance of comprehending it, the level design becomes far too open-ended towards the end, making it very difficult to figure out how to progress, and this can cause a lot of frustration. I ended up stuck, and gave up after much backtracking and getting lost. Optional objective markers would be a godsend.

However, the mechanics are sublime. As a big fan of Mirror's Edge, this game struck all the right notes with me. It takes the mechanics of wallrunning and sliding, and extends them to create walls and floors that form under you as you move. It's incredibly rewarding to navigate the world, and it creates an excellent sense of flow. Lemma is definitely worth a look.

Three Pros, Three Cons

Cons:
-The only really big flaw in this game - It's veeerry easy to get lost. You WILL lose track of where to go next several times. There's a large open world but no system of objectives and little or no guidance whatsoever. I got very frustrated even though I had already beaten the demo.
-The protagonist (you) act like a jerk sometimes. There's a phone where you receive a bare minimum of guidance for the first couple of levels, with a simple dialogue system with between one and three choices. Typically the choices are either "I need help" or "fuck off, I don't need your help".
-The parkour animations aren't very seamless. Joan (you) can do things that shouldn't be possible and in the process often hauls herself up by empty air or shoves a hand into solid rock. This happens so, so often.

Pros:
-It's beautiful. Skies, landscapes, textures, sounds, all of it. Soundtrack is amazing - not the sort of thing that I'd listen to a lot myself, but it fits the game very well. Sometimes it reminds me of Mirror's Edge soundtrack, sometimes Dear Esther. The enemies go through three stages - unsettling when watching from afar, for which I applaud, then terrifying as they chase you, then boring and frustrating later on when you have five of them chasing you while you just try to accomplish a task.
-Puzzles are satisfying and puzzly. Some of them are quite simple, but others are Myst-caliber. The parkour is very fun. I'm going to compare it to Mirror's Edge because it's a well known game that I've played extensively. Lemma's parkour is technically inferior, I guess, but it's more fun because of the nonlinear nature of it, especially when you add on Joan's special abilites. It's also more intuitive, less realistic (even discounting Joan's powers) and glitchier, although IMO not glitchy enough to be really frustrating.
-The story and lore... Wow. The story is compelling and ties into the lore well, which is very fleshed out. Also, you can look back and see clues to some of the big reveals in the game. The lore ties Joans' powers quite solidly into a layman's knowledge of quantum mechanics, and the whole alternate universe thing makes sense as long as you accept the basic premise and don't think too hard.

Overall, 8/10 would recommend, would play again.

This game is almost a perfect game of exploration, parkour, stealth, adventure, strategy, and is practically a God-Game, with lots of hours to explore this virtual open world of Lemma. This game will have your hands sweating and your stomach queazy IF you have some fear from heights, but never fear for you cannot die in this world. At times though this doesn't seem to help when you don't know how you are going to get to the next plateau, because dying is a way of thriving in this world. You build these walls and platforms of energy ice that will aid you to get to further plateaus that are otherwise inaccessable. You parkour; run, jump, climp, roll, and even build your way, your roads to other levels, other doorways, and other dimensions of Lemma... This game has excellent replay value, because you would never go about doing the same way twice, and you can go and explore at your own pace. BUT CAUTION - laying too many walls of engery ice may impede you from completing a level or even your ending, as the last level had done for me. There is no restart level, so you've got one shot to make it right. Save often at the beginning of each level and do not over-ride those saves until you are sure that you have not screwed up. [*Please note that I've personally have over 100 hours of gameplay at the end of the game, but am stuck on the last level, because I did just that and it's impossible to undo (destruction) all your previous construction! And I am going to restart the whole game completely over to get my ending I so deserve. Because knowing is half the battle!!!] Other than that, and a bit of confusion of what or where you are in reference to exactly where you are to go next, with so many countless doors and open world, YOU ARE VIRTUALLY AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE! Be prepared to be sucked into another dimension on the very precipice to soar to the heavens. I highly recommend this game, and again the replay value alone could and should give you an indication of just how enjoyable this game can be. ^5

Lemma will most often be compared to Mirror's Edge, Portal, Minecraft, in its style, gameplay, and remarkable simplicity of style. That's all good, and I think it's accurate.

I played the demo and fell in love with this from the start. Can't wait for VR with this. It's been a pure, hypnotic experience. Much like a rich dessert or a game like Portal, I'm torn between taking small portions to stretch out the experience as long as possible, really savoring each taste, or going full through in one sitting and playing through again.

Highly recommend---[NOTE: I played this with a 360 controller and it was awesome. Cannot too strongly encourage you to do the same]!

Do you like parkour?
Did you play Mirror's Edge?
Do you enjoy puzzles?
Want to go to another world?
Want to die a million times?

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, you should play this game.

This game is fantastic, I'm enjoying every bit of it.
It is seriously impressive as an indie game. The developer is a really cool guy too.

This game is a work of art.

An hour and forty into it thus far. The gameplay is SOLID. Imagine if Portal and Mirror's Edge had a baby. That would Lemma. Seriously, brilliant. And other then the tripe "amnesia" gimmick, the story is pretty solid thus far as well. Very existencial.

Highly recommended.