Glass Masquerade is a simple, elegant game which pays tribute to stained glass artisans of the last century and uses art deco themes to create a relaxing puzzle experience. You simply take shattered pieces of stained glass artwork and piece them back to create a stained glass mural. It’s both straightforward and enjoyable. The music is suited well to the game and it’s easy to play. You select a piece by shape, try to put it into the puzzle, and if it fits, it stays. If not, it spins back to one of the two rings around the artwork which hold all the puzzle pieces.
It’s an oft-done concept that’s usually done wrong. Onyx Lute manages to do it right for a change though, melding modern technology with jigsaw puzzle concepts to make something that feels fresh. It’s not incredibly challenging, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Simply whiling away the hours piecing together stained glass murals is surprisingly pleasant. Of course, I’m talking about the PC version, unfortunately.
Glass Masquerade was originally released for the PC by Onyx Lute. It was ported to the Switch by Stage Clear Studios, and they did an objectively terrible job doing so. First off, Glass Masquerade is designed from the ground up for a mouse. You click on a puzzle piece, it spins off the background, shows the image on it, and you use the mouse to fit it into the puzzle. It’s easy to slide the pieces about with a mouse, discard them, and pick new ones. Not so with the Switch however.
On the Switch, you’re forced to use the direction stick and buttons to pick up the pieces, and it’s a slow, plodding process. Your cursor speed is capped at an extremely slow pace, you have to highlight the pieces, and it’s difficult to rotate the rings that contain puzzle pieces. Once you do pick one up, you have to drag it painstakingly around the puzzle, looking for matches, and then if you can’t fit it, do the whole thing over again. It’s a process that breeds irritation in what is supposed to be an incredibly relaxing game.
Having completed the PC version of the game last year, I was looking forward to revisiting Glass Masquerade on the Switch, but I found that I could barely stand to play it. It’s simply not well-designed for a console. And the Switch seems like the perfect console for a game like this, because you don’t have to use the controllers. You can simply undock the unit and play portably using the touch screen. Fortunately, Glass Masquerade has that option. Unfortunately, it’s just as broken as docked play.
Using the Switch portably, you can indeed use the touch screen to play the game. You simply tap the puzzle piece you want, it spins up and you drag it to where you want it. Easy, right? Well, not so much. If you have larger hands, your finger will completely obscure the puzzle pieces, making it impossible to match them into the puzzle. Glass shards are often quite small and it is difficult to see them easily, even on the larger tablet-like Switch screen. Combine that with moving them around via touch and you’re basically trying to do a puzzle in the dark. Fun. Solution? Take your finger off and look for the spot to fit the piece. That doesn’t work either though, as the pieces spin back into place onto the ring again when you go to touch the screen again. Finishing even the very first puzzle was an exercise in frustration as pieces went back to where they came from when I was trying to drag them or I simply couldn’t see them around my fingertip.
So with touch controls virtually unplayable and controller use incredibly slow, what’s the point of playing Glass Masquerade? Sadly, not much. It simply isn’t the calming and beautiful puzzle experience that the PC version provides, and at $11.99 on the Nintendo eStore, you’re really not getting much bang for your buck. Hardcore puzzle aficionados might enjoy the game, but for everyone else, it’s best to avoid it. This is one glass puzzling experience that simply ended up shattered.
A digital copy of Glass Masquerade was supplied by the publisher for the purposes of this review and played on a Nintendo Switch both docked and undocked.