What Linus Bruckman Sees When His Eyes Are Closed is one of those games that I immediately placed on my imaginary “Must Play” list upon its release, but never really got around to playing for the longest time, for some unknown reason. Well, last night, I finally got around to playing the game, partly being inspired to do so by my colleague Gunnar Harboe’s glowing review over at Adventure Gamers. And I was definitely impressed.

Linus, for the uninitiated, is a Nintendo DS-inspired split screen affair where you essentially play two seemingly unrelated stories at the same time. It also consists of one rather difficult logic puzzle; however, unlike many adventure games I’ve played, the puzzle actually is the story, rather than an obstacle to it. Furthermore, said puzzle actually required me to do some quality thinking rather than simply guessing. It’s been quite a while since I’ve played an adventure game where I actually enjoyed the process of solving the puzzle enough to not be tempted to consult a walkthrough.

Even though I myself am gravitating away from writing puzzle-heavy games, it makes me happy to see that other people are actually doing them well, and in new, original, and, innovative forms. Linus is definitely an example of interactive art at its finest. Whoo!