Nemesis Factor

From: Hasbro Designer: Dave Tuller, et. al. List Price: $20 Players: 1 Playing Time: 5+ minutes  Type of game: Puzzle Skill level: 10 Complexity: 2  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 27, Summer 2002

Nemesis Factor, with its sleek jet black body, is a desktop object that cries out to be picked up and fiddled with.  Its form is a model of simplicity, a hollow cube with three faces removed and a pyramid of five colored buttons nestled inside. Passers-by can’t help but pluck it from its pedestal and wonder.

The device is an electronic puzzle— 100 electronic puzzles, really— wherein the object is to light up the colored buttons in order from bottom to top. Success is rewarded with the next puzzle in the series, until the final puzzle is cracked and the white beacon atop the device blazes to life in luminescent reward.

The vast majority of the puzzles are solved by trial and error, using logic to extrapolate future successes based on initial successes. If pushing the top button lights up the bottom one, for example, perhaps pushing the second from the top will light the second from the bottom. The most successful puzzles are call-and-response, where the machine says something (“Yellow”, “12”, “Green Red Blue”, etc) and the player must make the proper response to advance. Analysis and logic are rewarded here, as incremental successes provide key clues to the puzzle’s structure. Less engaging are puzzles in which no prompts or incremental feedback are given, and players must experiment with the buttons to explore their behavior. Often these puzzles are unlocked more by brute force and blind fumbling than any real insight. They break the game’s fundamental design paradigm as well, lighting up all buttons at once when the player runs through the expected hoops rather than encouraging the player through the intermediate success of lighting the next button.

As the game progresses, the puzzles introduce new elements—musical recognition, counting, trivia, timing, etc. The game’s hardware even holds a couple of surprises which aren’t immediately apparent, opening up completely new interaction paradigms as the player climbs his way toward the hundredth puzzle. Discovering these twists is part of Nemesis Factor’s delight.

Nobody’s expected to march through all hundred puzzles in one sitting, so up to four games can be stored at once. A rather meaningless score is tracked for each game, with a puzzle starting at 10 points and devaluing the more a player fumbles. I say “meaningless” because a puzzle’s value resets between sessions, making it possible to figure out a puzzle’s trick, shut the game down, and resume to collect the full ten. There’s no score penalty for taking the two hints offered with each puzzle either, although taking even one hint at any time prevents the beacon from blazing to life after the final puzzle.

I have a couple of quibbles with the game’s design. There’s no off switch—the unit shuts down after a period of interactivity. This is a major annoyance should you want to set it aside during those puzzles in which the game speaks continuously (“Shut UP already!”). The “repeat” and “hint” buttons are close together and poorly labeled, unnecessarily increasing the chance of accidents. The “green” button is more teal than green and the “blue” is purple. Since early puzzles call out colors, this caused quite a bit of confusion and frustration at first.

Nemesis Factor is a Lay’s potato chip kind of thing—it’s hard to do just one puzzle. The general uniformity of the puzzle paradigm is therefore a strength and a weakness. Either you’ll press onwards, wondering what the next twist will be, or you’ll grow bored of solving subtle variations on the same theme. The fact that there are variations is what makes Nemesis Factor engaging for me, where repetitive puzzles like Lights Out quickly faded.   A