Bilattice

Has fun rules to discover, and dives into deep complex interactions with them. I enjoyed a couple mind blowing moments with puzzles that had clever solutions. Graphics and sound design are decent. The game has a lot of charm, and the later interweaving mechanics are very unique and fun to discover. I reached a breaking point after way to many puzzles with seemingly no logical path to follow. Trial and error is my least favorite puzzle type to solve. I didn't enjoy fiddling around with many puzzles trying random things until stumbling upon a solution. Some puzzles had multiple solutions, and almost all of the puzzles have 2 or 4 solutions from rotational or horizontal symmetry. There were too many filler puzzles, they brought no new mechanics or concepts and was just another shuffled up jigsaw puzzle. The game is simple enough up until the credits that I found it enjoyable, but heading for the 100% introduces too much complexity without anything to hold onto that it became frustrating.

If you measure your enjoyment by the amount of time passed between the 'aha!' moment of a puzzle and the completion of the solution, Bilattice is the best puzzle game ever made. The grids in most puzzles are small enough that your triumph happens near simultaneously with your neurons firing up. Sometimes the simplicity leads to accidental guesses, but mostly in the easy puzzles - there are way too many solutions for the complex ones for this to work. This is where my biggest issue arises - there's an excellent period of rule discovery where the levels go by at light speed, and there are the real clunkers which are these impenetrable walls of symbols that require full mastery of the mechanics out of you. There are some in-between puzzles, but there doesn't seem to be enough of them. I think this really hurts the endgame, because after clearing most of the map I'm not sure if I'm ready to tackle any of the hardest puzzles. Elsewhere new interactions are being thrown in the middle of an another puzzle - this seems like an awkward change from sometimes overtutorialized first mechanics, too. The UI didn't bother me much. The people complaining about it are right, but I don't think it hurts the game in a major way. The ability to save the solution would've been cool to remind myself of some previously explained interactions. The map is quirky in a positive way for me, I think anything else would've felt sterile. There's more that slightly bothered me while playing - the design of the challenge, for example - yet I enjoyed the time spent. It's rough around the edges, but fun for the price, especially the rule discovery part of it.