Mystic Pillars X Kantara

This is an interesting little puzzle game that I cannot wholeheartedly recommend, but neither can I in good conscience give it a thumbs-down. I'm settling on giving it a thumbs-up, because I mostly had fun and it made my brain work, but be aware that it really has issues. Essentially your job is to manipulated gem/coins from pillar to pillar, attempting to create the right number of gems on each pillar. The catch of course is that your number of moves is limited, and you can only move your gems the number of pillars away as there are gems (in other words if you have three gems on a pillar, you can move all of them three pillars away, or two of them two pillars away and then with the remaining gem move it one pillar away; it becomes clearer in actual gameplay). The art is minimal and the cut-scenes are equally lowest common denominator, high-school art-class style illustrations, and the music is humdrum, so it's not exactly a feast for the senses. The gameplay is largely fun and intuitive, and even a lot of the difficult puzzles will eventually be solved as you have a “eureka” moment that makes you feel like a genius. But. BUT. There are utterly random difficulty spikes where you'll solve three problems in a row like a boss, and then be stumped by an absolutely horrendously convoluted puzzle.....followed by another two or three decent ones. In addition to the unexpected difficulty spikes, there's the sheer repetition of gameplay....there's 100 levels and while some are more or less complicated (and there is a wrinkle in gameplay about half-way through where some pillars have one-way arrows meaning you can only move gems in one direction from them) there's really no change in the basics of the puzzles. That's a lot of sameness with no real variety (and you may even think, as I did, that hey, if I break it up into six or seven levels per day in my downtime then it won't feel as samey/eye-gougingly repetitive......guess, what, it STILL does....very much so!) So, while I am ultimately recommending this game, be aware that it has several aspects (bland, barely competent artwork, random difficulty spikes, horribly repetitive gameplay) which are less than positive, and proceed accordingly.