Since the game is used at a high-school level, I wasn't expecting it to teach any advanced concepts or offer difficult brainteasers. In fact, what made me want to try out Kirchhoff's Revenge were the insults to the player, and I did enjoy that aspect of the game more than is reasonable. Even better is the heavy German accent of the voiceover. On the other hand, I could've done without the supposedly helpful, but actually just annoying, robot. The bird's eye view it provides doesn't really fix the shortcomings of assembling oversized circuits in a first-person perspective, the text-to-speech voice was annoying, and the subplot didn't go anywhere.

Kirchhoff's Revenge also suffers from a lack of optimization. It shows why it's great that amateurs can now develop pretty advanced 3D games, because occasionally we will get a little treasure like this – but also that a technically convincing end result still needs some experience. The download size is completely out of proportion for a game this small, it feels like it should have fit in about 10% of the space, although that might just come with Unity territory. Worse are the loading times, though. Each of the tiny levels takes progressively longer to load, towards the end I used to be stuck in the transition rooms for more than 20 seconds each.

2024 Update: I have re-played this short, cute game again and didn't encounter any big performance issues anymore, even though I played it on the same machine. I saw that there was an update in 2022, so it seems like this was fixed! There are some other technical issues like clipping errors and lighting bugs that make meters unreadable, but nothing that is too annoying.

Some other details felt like they were just missing (I painstakingly flushed all the potatoes, and saw the game even keeps count, so I was disappointed to not get a "reward" for my efforts). Overall, Kirchhoff's Revenge is still a cute idea, passably executed, with surprisingly good, voiced storytelling. The game is short and feels like it stops just at the point where all the basic concepts are introduced and it could start bringing the tougher puzzles. But as it is, it's definitely still worth checking out for the price of free, and sticking around to see whether there will be more updates.

Since the game is used at a high-school level, I wasn't expecting it to teach any advanced concepts or offer difficult brainteasers. In fact, what made me want to try out Kirchhoff's Revenge were the insults to the player, and I did enjoy that aspect of the game more than is reasonable. Even better is the heavy German accent of the voiceover. On the other hand, I could've done without the supposedly helpful, but actually just annoying, robot. The bird's eye view it provides doesn't really fix the shortcomings of assembling oversized circuits in a first-person perspective, the text-to-speech voice was annoying[spoiler], and the subplot didn't go anywhere[/spoiler]. [strike]Kirchhoff's Revenge also suffers from a lack of optimization. It shows why it's great that amateurs can now develop pretty advanced 3D games, because occasionally we will get a little treasure like this – but also that a technically convincing end result still needs some experience. The download size is completely out of proportion for a game this small, it feels like it should have fit in about 10% of the space, although that might just come with Unity territory. Worse are the loading times, though. Each of the tiny levels takes progressively longer to load, towards the end I used to be stuck in the transition rooms for more than 20 seconds each.[/strike] [b]2024 Update:[/b] I have re-played this short, cute game again and didn't encounter any big performance issues anymore, even though I played it on the same machine. I saw that there was an update in 2022, so it seems like this was fixed! There are some other technical issues like clipping errors and lighting bugs that make meters unreadable, but nothing that is too annoying. Some other details felt like they were just missing ([spoiler]I painstakingly flushed all the potatoes, and saw the game even keeps count, so I was disappointed to not get a "reward" for my efforts[/spoiler]). Overall, Kirchhoff's Revenge is still a cute idea, passably executed, with surprisingly good, voiced storytelling. The game is short and feels like it stops just at the point where all the basic concepts are introduced and it could start bringing the tougher puzzles. But as it is, it's definitely still worth checking out for the price of free, and sticking around to see whether there will be more updates.