As of editing this review, the dev had since responded to my critique about this game taking up a lot of time between restarts and has released an update, featuring a quick reset option to immediately restart the level from scratch, as well as a puzzle reset system on Level 5 to restart the last puzzle without having to start all over, making the game a whole lot more accommodating to newer players and resolving the frustrating waiting times between restarts. I have since picked up the game where I left off and was able to reach level 17 without any real problems, and so far I'm really enjoying discovering and playing around all of the cool features and mechanics that this game has to offer!
Huge thanks to Nicolas Jean (the developer) for updating the game!
[h1]Previous Review (Priror to Update)[/h1]
As someone whose had vague memories of playing games of a similar genre and graphics style on an 80-90's Macintosh when I was only around seven years old (currently in my twenties now), this game had really stood out to me and the whole concept of using a mix of physics, construction and programming logic to solve puzzles seems really fascinating both on paper and execution wise.
However, the reason I am unable to recommend this game is largely due to the monotonous amount of re-prepping and stalling that's required every single time you're having to restart a level, which you'll be doing each and every time you screw up at solving one of the puzzles that usually involves using and controlling a very finite amount of physics-based objects. For a puzzle game that seems to utilise trial and error as the main foundation for solving a lot of these puzzles, it's naturally frustrating having to sit through the "Failed!" text animation when I hit the 'Retry Level' button before being able to hit the 'Reset' button, watch the level transition in, close the briefing message and spend the next minute clearing all the previous puzzles again before I can [i]finally[/i] make another attempt at the same puzzle that I screwed up on (rinse and repeat), when all of this would be unnecessary if the game had simply featured checkpoints, a save/load state option or an undo button like in Baba Is You.
L005 (Level 5) is the first level that introduces physics-based objects and has a puzzle where you're having to sort between a relatively small pile of boulders and diamonds using remote trapdoors to get them to fall into their respective holes in order to open the next door, however with the way this is set up, it's very unclear how many of the boulders and diamonds you're needing to filter out in order to get them to fall at just the right pattern, otherwise you'll easily end up with them either falling into the wrong holes or getting stuck, ultimately soft locking the player, forcing them to restart the stage and spend around another minute solving all the previous puzzles just to make another attempt at the same puzzle again.
Moving onto L006, you're given control of a catapult with only 4 reserve boulders to fire from it from the start, which you need to catapult onto two detectors; one that's resting on a small platform that lowers a force field blocking the destructible wall you need to break though, and one that's just below the edge of another platform that seems to require a [i]very[/i] precise shot to open up another force field that feeds the catapult with 64 additional boulders. How you're meant to angle your shots to perfect this seems like pure guess work and requires a monotonous of a retrying. It was at this point where I had eventually lost what patience I had left and just decided to give up.
And yeah, I get it, it's meant to hard, it's a retro styled puzzle game, they didn't have save states back in the day and yada yada yada... but if you going to go this hard on punishing the player for their failed attempts at solving these puzzles - where at this stage they would still be trying to adapt to the game's physical programming - then either give them less margin for error, or let them be able to make another attempt at these puzzles at a much more time-convenient fashion.
