I don’t know about you, but I never think about how important color is in our daily lives. Without color, our perspective on things would be so much different. Everything would be boring and even a bit creepy.
I didn’t think about it like that until I played Discolored, a game that removes all the color, and makes it your job to get it back. You’ll do this by completing different puzzles in a deserted diner in the middle of nowhere.
Discolored is a puzzle game created by Jason Godbey and published by Shifty Eye. You start in what I can only assume is your office. Since the beginning, you need to start solving puzzles to start the real puzzles. You start by getting a viewer, a tool that’ll let you go through a painting Super Mario 64 style.
After you use the viewer, you end up inside the painting, in a lonely diner in the middle of the desert. Everything is silent, dark and colorless. Nothing tells you what to do, you have to already know what the goal of the game is.
The atmosphere makes you feel uneasy. I had to double-check if Discolored was just a puzzle game, or if it had scary elements in it. The lack of color and sounds, combined with a first-person perspective, keeps you waiting for some scary moment or a monster that chases you while you solve the puzzles. Thankfully, none of that happens.
Instead, you get a 3D puzzle with just one environment. This is a cool aspect of the game; being just the diner and its surroundings feels like you’...