This game was so good that I actually bothered to write a review for it. I finished the game around one month ago and waited until now to write this review to lower any recency bias.

At first glance, this game looks like any other standard 2D grid-based puzzle game. But it’s not. While you can push like in a Sokoban, pushing is far from the main focus. Instead, you’re given a magic wand to fire at beans to make monsters. Each level has different recipes for what you can make with these beans. It’s the interactions between monsters and thoughtful planning of how to manipulate them to reach your goal that makes the game so interesting. The ability to wait in place and plant any number of beans in any tile adds an unbelievable amount of complexity compared to games where only directional input is needed. You will NOT be able to brute force through puzzles with just a lucky sequence of directional inputs. Rather, the timing of your actions and efficient use of your resources will be required to win.

The game has crazy interactions for you to discover but is extraordinarily consistent with its base mechanics. Walls are always walls. Switches are always switches. You can never walk through or break walls, and you can't reprogram switches. The game respects these restrictions. This helps to narrow your scope of thinking, allowing the puzzles to deepen in complexity without adding unneeded tedium. The developers clearly knew what made their game interesting and stuck to its strengths.

Bean and Nothingness understands difficulty. It has some deathly challenging puzzles to appeal to maniacs like me, while also having some of the best introductory puzzles that help build some fundamentals. When you inevitably get stuck on a puzzle, you can always skip it and move on. You never have to beat any single level, just some number of levels before the next island is unlocked. Islands are unlocked quite quickly – you can reach the end of the game without needing to solve any of the more difficult levels. I enjoyed this design, as it let me progress through the game smoothly, with the option of going back to unsolved puzzles with more experience.

There are 180+ puzzles in this game. A lesser puzzle game is lucky to have around 20% good, well thought out levels, among a sea of filler puzzles (or worse yet, puzzles that are haphazardly designed or computer generated). In contrast, at least HALF of the levels in this game are excellent. Easy puzzles exist to help teach mechanics but avoid being pushovers, difficult puzzles are difficult in an interesting way. It’s rare to come out of a puzzle thinking “that puzzle sucked” in this game. The balance of puzzle quality and quantity, and the pacing of those puzzles, is something that even the best puzzle games fall short of.

The puzzle quality is excellent and avoids the most common pitfalls of puzzle design, in my opinion. Generally, I consider a puzzle poorly designed if:

1. There is an abundance of red herrings, or the puzzle is more about screening what to do than thinking about how to do something. Puzzles are more interesting when they focus on logic, rather than being a scavenger hunt.
   
2. Randomly guessing is a viable way to brute force the puzzle or ruin the puzzle in some other way. Experimentation is good and healthy in any game, but not to the point where you are trying the same few things every single level hoping that one will work.
   
3. Puzzles are tedious to the point where it takes more time to play out the solution than to think of the solution. This might happen if a previous level is too similar or if there’s such a powerful mechanic that can solve many different puzzles.

These are only a few examples. I rarely found myself upset at the way a puzzle was designed in this game (<10% of puzzles?) which is very impressive. In contrast, the game has a lot of good puzzle design elements. The best puzzles make it clear what you need to do but unclear how you are supposed to do it. They make you wonder "how is this even possible???" until you think of a brilliant new idea you haven’t considered before.

Obstacles and walls are placed with purpose, rather than to make movement tedious. It’s a game that challenges your ability to come up with a creative solution rather than testing your patience. Puzzles feel fair, not gimmicky. After finishing the game, there’s a bonus island of puzzles, which showcases some worse puzzles that were cut from the main game. It’s a nice bonus to dedicated players without worsening the experience for the general audience.

The game has an unbelievable amount of depth. Even after I finished the game, the community made custom levels, as well as my own creations, kept revealing new and unique interactions needed to solve puzzles. It feels both mind-blowing and frightening at the same time.

This game also has a few QOL features, some of which should definitely be implemented in other puzzle games.

• Bookmarking – My favorite feature. You can create save states when solving puzzles, allowing you to easily revert to a set point in the puzzle rather than fully restarting.
  
• Fast Travel – lets you enter any level from the map at any time. Self explanatory.
  
• Colorblind Mode – gives the beans different shapes!
  
• Sandbox (level editor) – you can make your own custom levels, and the level editor is pretty good, aside from not having an undo button. This lets you test your crazy ideas or remake parts of levels to see if your idea will work. It also lets anyone make and share custom levels without mods or external downloads. Importing other players’ puzzles is also very easy.
  
• Saved Replays – puzzles you solved have their replays saved, and you can watch what you did to solve a past puzzle. You can also copy your solution as a text string, which is also useful for sharing how you solved a level, particularly for custom levels.

On a personal level, I felt like the game just clicked with me in all aspects. The writing in this game is fun, with a good mix of humor and silliness to keep it entertaining. It won’t appeal to everyone, but I enjoyed reading the field notes and completion messages. I remember reading the altar text after completing the 7th island and thinking “this is exactly something I would write!” The game also gave me the haunting and dreadful "oh no, I might not be smart enough to finish this game…” feeling during the final set of puzzles. Luckily, it was a challenge I was able to overcome, which made the end of the game even more satisfying.

This is a game I can recommend to anyone who enjoys puzzles. It has good pacing, puzzle quality, and challenge. It creates countless brilliant moments and enables plenty of mad science experiments. This became my favorite game of all time, even across different genres. I hope it gets more attention.

game to fall sleep