Something I've begun to appreciate with this Indie Game of the Week column is the restorative powers of a breezy, minimally-challenging game that can suck you into its aesthetic for a few hours and spit you back out feeling rejuvenated and relaxed. Not that my life has been particularly stressful of late, but this Thursday saw the one-two punch of the final formatting of this colossus of an E3 trailer list and a dentist appointment I was sure would lead to some expensive and painful elective surgery. In other words, I really needed the digital balm that was Glass Masquerade: a 2016 puzzle game from studio Onyx Lute, originally released for Android.

Glass Masquerade's premise couldn't be more straightforward: the player is perusing various artistic timepieces from across the world, and has to reassemble the stained glass art deco backgrounds of each using a selection of shards. It's a jigsaw game, in other words, and not a particularly complex one in terms of additional mechanics or rules to observe. You simply have an array of pieces and must figure out where in the timepiece's face they belong. The game even helps you along in a few ways, giving you some placement guides for your first half-dozen or so pieces to get you started and having all the pieces be irregular shapes to make it easier to identify which one is best suited for the gap you're looking at. To balance the difficulty, you don't have a finished picture to consult and work from, nor can you actually see what's on the stained glass shards until you pick them up. To the game's credit also, the timepiece frames don't all conform to a square or a circle - as in, traditional jigsaw shapes - but rather are comprised of various patterns and etchings that you often have to work around.

Then you have that soothing aesthetic, as classical music plays in the background while you're assembling these attractive stained glass displays in a subdued light. The music often reflects the part of the world you're in, or at least seemed to, and it was the right atmosphere to lose yourself in some jigsaw puzzles for a few hours. Even with the short length of the game - about 26 puzzles plus the DLC, each of which took between 2-10 minutes - time seemed to pass even quicker while I was playing. I was about to note how short the game was even for the meager asking price, but then I noticed two hours had passed in what felt like thirty minutes. I've have definitely preferred it if it was longer, but Indie developers often have to be judicious with the time and resources alloted to them. Hopefully this one saw enough sales given its glowing reviews that the team is busy at work on an expanded sequel.

So, in closing, Glass Masquerade is a wisp of a game with a basic and ubiquitous puzzle gameplay model, but it does that gameplay and establishes its mood so well that I really don't have a harsh word to say about it. Know what you're getting yourself in for and you won't be disappointed, especially for the two bucks it's asking for in the present sale.

Rating: 4 out of 5.