Ugly is clearly a labor of love. Its visuals are beautiful, with detailed animations and loads of detail. Its music does a great job at setting the tone of the game. And the story? Incredibly fleshed out (and disturbing) despite being wordless.

But... I did not enjoy my time with Ugly.

I struggled with the controls throughout the entire game. There are only a few actions that you can do (jump, place/retract mirror, swap, and restart) but I constantly mistook the placing/retracting mirror and swap buttons, which often forced me to restart puzzles just to get back to where I was. Call it a skill issue or whatever, but this game would have benefited greatly if it let you separate the mirror mechanic to 2 different buttons or even from a rewind mechanic that would let you go back a few seconds. Some puzzles are pretty large but there is no option to zoom out to see the entire thing.

The boss encounters feel out of place. While a majority of the game is a slow and pretty methodical puzzle platformer, the boss encounters are comparatively way faster paced and require much more precision. They feel bad because... it's a puzzle platformer and you aren't afforded the movement options of a different type of platformer. However, they aren't that difficult BESIDES the final boss. That thing killed any motivation I had to continue playing after seeing credits.

And while I liked the story, there's a beat that I hated that left a really sour taste in my mouth.