IGF finalist puzzler Ethereal gets March release date

Abstract puzzler Ethereal, one of the games nominated for excellence in audio at the 2019 Independent Games Festival, will be out on March 7, developer Nonsense Arts has announced.

As you'd expect, the sound design is fantastic, and you can get a taste for it in the trailer at the bottom of this post or in the soundtrack, which Argentinian developers Nicolás Recabarren and Tomás Batista have stuck on Spotify . It's hypnotic, and everything in its series of levels has a corresponding noise, which makes it feel reactive.

The puzzles look surreal and unknowable: even after watching the trailer I'm not fully sure of all its mechanics. You're guiding a blob of colour around 24 levels made of blocks and wiggly lines, changing the direction of the blob to make it to the end, and the levels rotate and change colour at certain points.

It has four themed worlds, each of which will have quirks and new tricks to learn, and there won't be any time pressure, which should let you relax and poke around for as long as you want.

At any rate, it'll be one worth watching out for. The game will be out on Steam, the Humble Store and itch.io.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.