Hack 'n' Slash

peanut would love some pets and treats :) 　　 　　🌸＞　　フ 　　 　　| 　_　 _ l 　　 　／` ミ＿xノ 　 　 /　　　 　 | 　　 /　 ヽ　　 ﾉ 　 │　　|　|　| ／￣|　　 |　|　| | (￣ヽ＿_ヽ_)__) ＼二つ

The puzzles are alright until it feels like you're debugging someone else's messy code. This is what happens when a clever idea escapes from a brainstorming meeting before anyone actually checks if it is fun.

Quoting another review here: > Additionally, there were too many ways to get past things without doing it right, making it possible for you to actually get stuck in the game. Ah yes, I remember when I softlocked myself in the game and tried to fix the problem that put me in a forced infinite recursion loop. I really didn't know what to do for like 20 solid minutes until I realized that this game literally has a wayback machine built in; savegames are tree-like in that you can always go back to an earlier point and diverge from there, even allowing you to load a different branch if I'm not mistaken, so while you could soft-lock yourself in a single puzzle, you could just go back one room and try a different way. You could go back infinitely far and have a single savegame with several story branches. Please note that this is me talking about a game I last touched like a decade ago, so this information may be wildly inaccurate. I remember the actual story being a bit on the short side, there not being enough puzzles (which could either mean the game was very good, or very bad, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it very much), but I also remember being able to side-step half the puzzles when really all you were thinking was "wait, can I actually.…". This is a good thing; the game encourages you to be creative, to break the rules, to mess around. This is literally a graphical version of giving a 12 year old a computer, a copy of The C Programming Language, and a running Linux system. I'm 90% sure there are two kinds of players of this game, one of them constantly complains that this game doesn't force them to obey rules and puzzle solving isn't linear enough, and the other feels as if they were a god-like being with powers beyond comprehension because they can write a loop that does something relatively simple but the loop is something [i]they have made themselves[/i] so it's the best thing in the world to see it work. I give this game a 10/10 just because it exists, bugs and everything (again, it's too long for me to even remember whether or not it crashed, I don't think it did tho). It's Linux native to boot (or it used to be.… this game is from before the Steam runtime IIRC so what counts is that it once did work natively), and it's priced just right IMHO (YMMV). The problem with giving a proper review that tells you about the game in a way that helps you figure out whether or not you wanna buy it is that it's a hit or miss; regardless of wheter you can write code, regardless of whether you know what a Hello World is, regardless of whether you have touched a computer in the past 50 years, you will either like or dislike it and no amount of pondering will help me give you a baseline metric by which you can guesstimate in which group you end up. Be a professional coder and hate the game. Be a carpenter and love it. Be a farmer and hate it. Be a sysadmin and love it. Whether or not you like coding has little to do with this game as far as I can tell it. Just go and buy it, you can blame me if you don't like it.