Published: 31 Aug 2024
Last updated: 1 Sep 2024
- Developed and Published by: ARIELEK
- Released on: 2022
- Genres: Casual, Puzzle
- Rating: 2/5
- Originally written: ~30th December 2023
Its certainly a beautiful puzzle game, and an awful lot of work has been done give it such a distinct style, and it really is a great feast for the eyes and ears.
Its a shame then, that the puzzle game itself contained within, manipulating the environment (by removing, adding, swapping and transforming) never quite clicked with me. Its unfortunate, but my main issue stems from the game forcing you to perform the requisite to solve the puzzle in a deliberate sequential order.
This meant, combined with the sometimes confusing UI of what moves you actually have available - meant it felt required to use lots and lots of ’trail-and-error’/‘dumb luck’ to actually solve the individual puzzles which severely reduces the sense of achievement. It doesn’t matter in the introductory puzzles when the solutions are reasonably obvious and introducing concepts, but it can feel super frustrating later. That combined with sometimes having difficulty digging through the visual eye candy (e.g. determining what’s elevated and what’s not) and some of the later puzzles having “red” herring actions that are redundant but cannot be skipped which feels like a poor joke.
Its a shame, there’s a lot to like (I think its worth recommending to anyone who enjoys comfy puzzle games), and I really appreciate the hint system integrated into the game to guide you on, but when I realised that I was using it as a crutch to solve levels, I wound up dropping it soon after.
