“Dive into the paintings of artists such as Joseph Turner, Max
Ernst, David Friedrich, and Joseph Cornell in a point'n'click adventure
that will take you through the fantastic world of Nubla, full of puzzles
and forgotten places. … Nubla is a graphic adventure that brings
together the worlds of art, technology, and video games, exploring the
works of the National Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza of Modern Art (Madrid,
Spain) in an interactive story about self-discovery, memory, and
identity”.
So says the description on the Steam page.
It apparently began life as a way of incorporating technology, and
more specifically games, into a museum educational program, and was
built by a group of game design students from a Spanish university. It
enables you to literally step into a number of artworks, solving puzzles
as you do so.
There is a story of sorts that unfolds as you go but it wasn’t
really integral to the gameplay. Or perhaps that was just me. The art
and the puzzles provide the main fare.
Which amounts to a gentle bit of short (90 minutes should see you
through), pretty puzzling, once you work out the way the controls work.
The game is played exclusively with the keyboard. You crawl and jump,
drag some things around, and have a special power that I think was only
relevant once. It took me a while to realise that you can jump higher by
jumping again in mid-air. File that away for future reference if you
play.
None of the puzzles are hard, and some involve finding items as you
go. I did occasionally wonder what I was supposed to do next, but some
tried and true adventuring techniques moved me on.
There is no spoken word but there is a rather good musical score. The
game autosaves and you may have to repeat some play depending on when
you exit. You go back and forth between paintings and the museum
corridor, and as far as I could tell, exiting in a painting meant you
resumed before you entered that painting.
I have played a couple of other games where you explore art in a
similar way (Monet, Mission Sunlight) and while none were “must plays”,
I admire different ways to entice people to engage with art. Especially
when we all can’t just pop down to do the museum in question. Nubla is
another title to add to the mix.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-9700k 3.7GHz
