If you’re a puzzle fan who wants something unique to add to your library, you’re in for a treat. The Lullaby of Life is a sound-based puzzle experience which places you in the blobby shoes of a particle with the ability to create music, exploring the origins of the universe.
At first glance, this game is striking. The aesthetic is vibrant and psychedelic, with seven different chapters, each revolving around a new celestial body and all with their own unique visuals, quirks, and styles of puzzle. Some may require you to work on timing, while others may test your ability to spot hidden paths.
Every world has a main puzzle in the centre which requires a variety of different noise buttons to be pressed. To access the correct sounds, you’ll need to explore the spiralling worlds and methodically unpick each smaller puzzle using your toolkit. Finishing the main puzzle will allow you to move on to the next world and chapter.
Your blob can produce three individual noises mapped to the 'Y', 'B', and 'A' buttons. A puzzle might task you with pressing each button in the right order, sending a soundwave down a tunnel and opening a gate, or using a movable block to keep a barricade from closing.
As you explore the mesmerising worlds and work on unravelling conundrums, you’ll come across allies which you’ll need to unlock by solving a smaller puzzle. These allies can create their own special noises to accompany yours, which can assist with the smaller tasks and are crucial for solving the centre puzzle.
Our playthrough took us to just under the four-and-a-half-hour mark – a little longer than average, thanks to this reviewer getting distracted and looking for secrets. It’s possible to speed through a lot quicker if you aren’t fussed about 100%-ing the game, but there are multiple secrets for completionists.
For the most part, the game felt slow and enjoyable. Exploring a new section of a planet was calming, with new passages being opened up after careful experimentation and cooperative work with your band of squishy pals. The meandering pace paired perfectly with the soothing music – up until a certain point in a late chapter when an aggressive enemy was introduced. After several chapters of relaxing exploration and puzzle-solving, the need to dodge and run away was suddenly crucial. Having a sudden chase scene in a chilled puzzler did feel somewhat random, but it helped to break up the story and tested our reflexes, too. The Lullaby of Life’s advertising promises a musical adventure with puzzles that test, “timing, focus, dexterity, and agility,” — we found this to be accurate.
In terms of pacing, this game could easily be tackled in one sitting by a dedicated puzzle fan. It's an intuitive game and doesn’t hold your hand, with an extremely minimalistic tutorial and no dialogue throughout. The puzzles do get more complex as things progress, but not to the extent that they feel frustrating.
It is possible for your character to die (we died three times overall, twice during that chase scene) and it’s possible to lose allies, too. Despite the lack of facial features or dialogue, we were sad when our allies turned into puffs of astral smoke after being smote by a fireball or angry space critter. Luckily, there’s a solid auto-save feature which means dying isn’t too much of a hassle and you won’t need to replay hours of complex puzzles to get back to where you were. If your ally dies, they can be found back at their spawn point, ready to be unlocked again.
Performance-wise, The Lullaby of Life plays well on the Switch. We did notice it looked a little better in handheld mode versus docked, but only by a small margin. There were no graphical issues or quirks, and the controls were suitable for the gameplay style. You'll spend the majority of your time in the game using the analogue sticks to navigate and solve puzzles. This is fine enough, but the margin for error is tight and several puzzles require you to quickly switch back and forth between your various allies. It can be quite fiddly, which led to us having to restart a handful of tasks.
Aside from this, The Lullaby of Life is a soothing and mesmerising experience, and it would’ve been incredible to have more of it. The run-time was fine but there was definitely room for more puzzles, or perhaps a harder mode for experienced players.
Conclusion
Playing through The Lullaby of Life was a joy, with plenty of challenging moments without feeling frustrating, and it feels perfectly at home on the Switch. Each chapter has its own distinct personality and the music adds a lot of soul to each new planet. If you enjoy quirky, unique puzzle titles with cute characters and interesting mechanics, this is a gem that needs to be in your library — one that's especially suited to handheld players with headphones, as the music really is beautiful.
