If you’re a puzzle fan, the Switch has been absolutely loaded with a diverse collection of titles that should please just about any taste. One type of puzzler I’ve been surprised not to see more of on the system would be games in the same vein as The Room, sporting some intricate figures or environments with a series of puzzles that help to reveal the path to the next stage. While I don’t think I’ve seen too many titles as a whole reach that same level of polish as The Room series, it seems like a formula I would have expected to see more people try to target.

Doors: Paradox isn’t quite the same in terms of how it is set up, and its production design isn’t anywhere near as refined, but there’s no doubt that this sort of play was what they had in mind. In this case you’ll always be in a space with a door, able to interact with both sides of it. Play ends up feeling somewhere between a point-and-click adventure, with you poking at the environment and objects, looking for things to pick up and interact with, then working out how to use any of those objects to advance things. For the most part these puzzles end up being pretty reasonable in their construction, sometimes perhaps being a little odd in the rules of their progression, but not generally making huge leaps in logic.

The problem I had was with the controls, but I’ll absolutely say that this is an issue relative to how you’re playing the game. In handheld mode, using the touchscreen controls, the game is pretty straightforward and works well. Unfortunately, if you’re playing docked or with a controller I can’t say the same though. The more cursor-driven controls mostly work, but they’re absolutely quite cumbersome as a whole. The problem is that for performing certain tasks the control situation moves from slow and inconvenient to pretty maddening. Some puzzle elements simply don’t interact with you in a way that feels intuitive, and when that understanding of what you’re supposed to be doing begins to break down you’re no longer solving a puzzle, it feels like you’re trying to bypass a flawed control scheme.

If you’re going to play this on the go using the touchscreen, much like a tablet, this is a reasonably good puzzler that should give you a few hours of brain teasers that work well enough. If, however, you’re using a controller I’m less inclined to give it a recommendation. Yes, you’ll be able to get around it and deal with the implementation, but compared to a few other games like this out there, this is the most encumbered that I’ve encountered, and that really detracts from the fun.