Recent reviews by bateleur

This game is a perfect example of how a strong core mechanic and good extensions to that mechanic are central to modern puzzle design. Despite having a lot of levels it stays interesting throughout and there's still a bit of unexplored design space by the end.

There's a high standard of level design, but unusually the game plays around with different design styles as well as different sizes of level. I personally really enjoyed the large end-of-section levels, which felt like the puzzle equivalent of boss fights.

The game gives you a lot of freedom to skip levels and choose the order in which you play things. This, combined with a generous selection of easy levels near the start, makes it a good introduction to hard puzzles for players coming from a casual puzzle background.

Definitely worth picking up. Also very good value for the price. I look forward to the designer's future projects.

Although the game starts very slowly and feels at first like a port of a casual, mobile game it eventually develops into some interesting puzzles. The textless tutorial isn't very clear, but once you get used to them the controls are good and the whole game is well made. Certainly recommended for the price.

As a fan of the developer's previous games I was looking forward to this and was not disappointed. High puzzle quality as expected, but it's also a highly polished release and it a really big game with an impressive selection of mechanics to play with.

There's always a risk with games that invite the player to learn their intricacies without instruction that you become hopelessly stuck or it's simply frustrating. Bonfire Peaks avoids this trap in a number of ways, always giving you plenty of choice in which levels you tackle and providing carefully designed introductory levels which let you discover things naturally through play.

Loved this game! Its design shows a really strong understanding of what makes puzzles fun. It does a great job of exploring the interesting aspects of its own mechanics.

The use of multiple characters is a nice way to link a lot of similar design space without things becoming either repetitive or absurdly overcomplicated, since you only ever play one character at a time.

The visual and textual themes of the game are intriguingly odd, but in a good way. Seemed to fit the gameplay and never got in the way.

This is a clever design with some really original gameplay. The level design explores the available design space really well and none of the levels feel like filler.

By the standards of the world of puzzle games Room to Grow is fairly easy to get into, but despite the cute theme and the way it guides the player's learning, this is definitely not a casual game. It might, however, be an excellent introductory game for someone who'd like to get into puzzle games but is intimidated by some of the more hardcore games in the genre.

The game's mechanics are introduced gradually across the levels, but all of them feel so natural that in some ways there is only one mechanic. Nonetheless, some of the later levels are properly challenging and you get a lot of puzzle for your money.

A well made puzzle game with high quality puzzles and a carefully tuned difficulty curve. The pace of introduction of new mechanics is good and all the mechanics explored are interesting and fit together well.

As well as the main levels, each set has bonus levels which unlock as you clear the base stages, so even elite puzzle solvers will find plenty to challenge them.

I'm not normally a huge fan of "optimise a machine" gameplay, but Prime Mover makes some good design decisions which leave it ahead of the competition if, like me, you prefer the puzzle solving aspects of these games to fussing around trying to shave off one more cycle or one more cell.

First, the "new board" component means that if you won't find otherwise perfectly good solutions being frustrated by space constraints nearly as often as in similar games. This lets you focus more on the workings of your machine and less on endlessly rewiring things.

Second, the "cut and paste" feature and the ability to rotate before pasting remove a lot of tedious busywork from the game and make building large, complex machines and pleasure rather than a chore.

The one thing about Prime Mover which might not suit some players is the difficulty curve. There's a friendly set of tutorial levels which introduce each component, then within a few levels the challenge level jumps ahead to some pretty serious problems. By the time you're eight levels in you'll be facing problems that will seriously challenge even puzzle veterans. For this reason, I wouldn't recommend buying this game to introduce your nine year old to circuits!

Overall a very well-made game. 12 hours in I'm nowhere near the end yet and very much looking forward to the rest.