Not a new game, but I was reminded I had this on my wish list by @Father.Torque’s post in Games You Played Today.
This is a top-down block-pusher, very responsive and aesthetically pleasing, but in the style of Animal Well and its layers of secrets and challenges. “No in-game text,” though that doesn’t equate to “no in-game story.”
I’m enjoying it; I made it through the first major region, though there’s still some stuff I have to get back to there. (I only found two of the secret music-notes, to say nothing of the star barriers I can’t yet break.) In the second major area, I’m trying to work through the initial puzzles that gate access to the big day/night(?) buttons in the middle, but I decided I need to call it a night before I go much further.
Very cool game! I will probably ask for hints soon!
Thinking more about the Animal Well comparison, I had to ask: did noted puzzle game enthusiast Zarf review this game? It turns out that he did—in the very same post in which he reviewed Animal Well, in fact! Looks like he decided to stop playing around 75 stars in.
After making my post last night, I ended up logging back in long enough to activate the second set of elementals, and I’ve made some initial inroads to the third major region. Is the NPC inducing visions by smacking the player character over the head? The sound effect seems to suggest that this is the case.
This game totally rules. I got it when it came out and I had a great time, but I dropped it during the extremely frustrating ice island. The designer updated the game to make that level more intuitive, so I’ve been meaning to go back to it.
Yeah Jason mentioned it in gypt but apparently there was a big update like 8 months ago and added a ton of stuff and edited previous stuff. So don’t worry, the ice island is not unintuitive, they’ve added another entirely new unintuitive island after that instead
I definitely sympathize with walking onto a new screen and being like “jesus christ what do I do with all this shit” but part of the joy of the game is breaking down the rooms into puzzle chunks and sorting them into smaller problems. As for his navigation difficulties I dunno maybe that’s something they improved with the update. You never have to re-solve a puzzle just to walk around an area, that’s crazy; they all involve permanent alterations once you solve them to make traversing them later simple. Occasionally you may have to re-solve a puzzle (often only partially) to solve another puzzle but that’s a different thing eh.
I do believe this is the case, which is very cute and funny, especially when you resolve the end of the story and get the full picture of your avatar’s provenance.
I played this when it was new and enjoyed it, but I eventually found that its open world started to work against it. I circled tediously among the islands with unsolved puzzles I was aware of, trying to determine which ones were possible and which ones required an upgrade I didn’t yet have. When I hadn’t made any progress in several sessions, I gave up.
But before I reached that point I had a lot of fun with the game and I’d still recommend it. The puzzles are clever and varied.
I opened it up just now to see how many stars I managed to get–55. Which I guess isn’t even half of them.
Cracked open some real shit today, got the 120th star, found a couple supercollectibles that had been eluding me and then stumbled upon yet another, higher, even more mysterious quest?? How???
loved playing this game around when it came out but did kinda feel like it failed to stick the landing at the time. i remember reaching the end scene and going “wait, it’s over?” there was more shit to pick up if i wanted to of course but i lost motivation after that. felt symptomatic that i managed to softlock the game in the last area by doing things in an unusual order
it is a very cool thing they put together overall though, lots of moving parts and it’s impressive that it mostly holds together under its own weight. also nice when a puzzle game is both challenging and “hangoutable,” a lot of true puzzle sicko designers don’t bother with lots of aesthetic/polish stuff
Given all these reports I can’t help but feel that the big update must’ve been really big, I felt the (normal) ending was great, the puzzles kept getting remixed in novel and interesting ways and the game never felt like it got weak (except a fiddly new mechanic in the new big island that I think was added post-update, not a huge fan of it, but luckily it has a limited blast radius and admittedly it enables some interesting new puzzles). For all y’all that played some and then dropped it on release, I highly encourage you to give it another chance now.
The final set of levels in the release version where the opposite of tightly designed, of the four of them I knew for a fact I beat two of them in unintended ways (the bit where whole sections were not used was a giveaway) and I heard it was possible to pull off in at least one more of them.
I am tempted to load up the game to see what’s new but I believe one part of the update doesn’t work with legacy saves and it feels like a rough idea to go try and tackle meta stuff when I likely don’t recall half of the world layout and an entire major island was redesigned since then.
