TouchTone has a much interesting framing device than the actual gameplay most of the time and the relative boredom I had while moving move rows and columns of lines in order to reflect beams on targets outbalanced my desire to see the story through. Which is a shame since it seemed at least interesting and novel, setting you as this spy going through communications in order to assess whether someone is relevant to national security or not. I'm a bit disappointed by it.
Let's dive into what bugged me the whole time; In order to solve the puzzles, you need to slide rows and columns of lines around so that they reflect beams from one exit to another of the same color. These lines either reflect beams in a certain angle, or split them - and there might be others later on - and you move them around until the puzzle is solved. Having to slide entire rows and columns means that you'll break your solution just in order to move another piece in place. It's like breaking up a jigsaw in order to place another piece, you know you have part of the solution, but it's frustrating nonetheless to make steps backwards in order to move forward. It might have simplified the puzzle solving a little too much, but I would've made it so you could just move the 'mirrors' around by sliding them at-will.
And it's too bad that I got frustrated with this because the game is interesting in other ways than it's core gameplay loop. You solve a series of puzzles in order to figure out bits and pieces of conversation between two characters, and then you have to decide if that conversation is relevant to national security, and the game judges your decision. Actually, I feel like all conversations are 'relevant' because once I've picked 'non-relevant' too many times, the game gave me a subtle nod by disabling that option and explained that everyone is guilty of something, or reasoning as such. There is also some stuff about cyber-security, hacking, and the plot line is quite good.
However, if the act of moving these mirrors by rows and columns isn't fun, I really couldn't spend much more time on TouchTone, even if I wanted to. It's a neat little idea, but that particular brand of puzzle-solving didn't push my buttons in any satisfying way.
