Kine! What a wonderfully opaque, wide-ranging word. It apparently means cattle or excellent in Hawaiian Pidgin English, but I’m guessing the nod here is to kinematics as in abstract, mechanical motion . That explains about half of Gwen Frey’s swish, challenging puzzler — her solo debut, after leaving Flame in the Flood developer The Molasses Flood and founding new studio Chump Squad. At its most elementary, it’s a game about rolling blocks around small, densely furnished grids towards an exit square. But it’s also, somehow, about jazz, blues, friendship, romance and hitting the Big Time, set in a glorious Hollywood twilight of purple and brass. Here’s Wot I Think.
Those blocks? They are up-and-coming musicians with jaunty little faces, who jiggle along to the soundtrack when left to their own devices. They also happen to be musical instruments — a drum, an accordion and a trombone — whose moving parts can be either tools or hindrances. The puzzles they negotiate are steps on the way to a spotlit Main Stage at the top of the world map, where fame, fortune and (in my case) horrible migraines await. It’s like La La Land, if La La Land was three interlocking Rubik’s cubes. It’s by turns good fun and rather exhausting.