Recent reviews by coderanger

A fun little tiny-zelda. It only takes maybe an hour but it's a very fun hour, highly recommended.

The aesthetic is cute but the same is anything but chill. If you make a "mistake" during a level you have no choice but to start over for seemingly no reason.

One of the Kickstarter backers and I'm very happy with the results. It's a great length for one or two nights. The story is a little more linear than I expected in that there's a fairly "natural" way to play through it but the flip side is that means the out-of-order delivery is tweaked to really land well. This isn't really a "choose your own adventure" story so much as a single narrative told in funky order and with multiple timelines.

The art and music are lovely, and the characters really feel lived in despite the short length.

Big thumbs up from me.

My actual playtime is probably in the hundreds of hours if you count the web and mobile clients. Very deep for an idle game with lots of things to do and fun corners to explore. 1.0 has brought a whole new set of combat trials I haven't even started yet and looking forward to them!

I really tried to like this. It's very close to be excellent but they just didn't quite nail the very nebulous "good puzzle design" issue. I think the main problem I had is that the designer(s) treated every new level as building on all previous levels, not just conceptually but also mechanically. Almost every new puzzle mechanic, once introduced, is used in all future puzzles. And the game is long, easily twice as long as it needed to be. As the number of elements in a puzzle space rises, the available interactions go up exponentially. So by the end puzzles are these sprawling spaces with dozens of potential next steps to prune through which makes it feel more like random fumbling a lot of the time, as opposed to the sought after "a ha moment". Add to this that the mechanics are very "fiddly", you're often going to need to launch one cube off another an angle but there nothing in the game which snap it to the right place, you just have to eyeball it. It's very common to have the solution in your head but spend 20 minutes just wrangling the pieces into the right alignment. If they had made each segment about half the length and focused things to build reasoning skills about the game's world rather than just laying mechanics forever I think this could have been a real winner.

All the above is really a shame because the 3D art, lighting effects, sound, etc all completely gorgeous. I see in other reviews that some found the characters annoying and while I can see how they would rub some the wrong way, I really liked them. It felt like a very "real" set of people, more rough edges than sci-fi usually shows (swearing, being sarcastic, having an unpleasant phone call with an ex). The ending is a bit "and then it was over" but it does the job nicely in the context of a Portal-a-like lightweight story.

If you get frustrated part way through (I made it almost exactly halfway and then rage quit on one extra fiddly puzzle I had to completely restart 3 times), there's some excellent YouTube videos of the whole thing you can just blitz through to see the mechanics that get added and watch the ending, it was a much better way for me to experience the game and it might be for you too.

Grindy as hell and honestly it just doesn't go anywhere. I think they were trying to make an idle game but then reconsidered halfway through. I edited my save file to give myself functionally infinite gold and burned through the content just to see what if there was anything interesting in there. There was not.

Silly to the max but has a good heart and a bunch of inventive puzzles via fourth-wall breaks and general genre subversion. If you liked Stanley Parable, you'll probably like this too.

This game is so exactly my jam it's remarkable. The nonograms (aka picross) are well made (though the lack of an "undo" button is sometimes annoying), the music is cute (though I usually mute while solving), and the story is genuinely cute (silly, over the top, corny, but full of heart). And they legit made an anime style intro that is just perfect. Honestly my only critique other that undo button thing is that it's so short and given the runaway success of Fall Guys means we'll never get more of this, and that makes me sad.

Incredibly scattered. They were trying to mix Animal Crossing with some vague semblance of a narrative, but telling a story in several dozen 10 minute chunks spread out over weeks or months (depending on how often you remember to launch it) leaves things far too thin to carry what is otherwise just a bad AC clone. They even reimplemented AC features that make no sense, like your shovel breaks over time (no other tools, just the shovel) or sharply limited inventory space (despite not understanding that AC is careful to not expose new item types until you can upgrade your storage substantially faster than you can here). The Spry Fox art and music is still firing on all cylinders and if they ever realize their mistake and remove the time gating this would probably be a very pleasant light-weight adventure game but until then it just isn't enough to recommend.

An inventive idea ruined by poor execution. The lack of undo in puzzle levels is what made me stop after only a few rounds, if you mess up near the end of a puzzle, start over. The controls feel needlessly annoying and clunky, cutscenes are slow and unskippable (or at least I couldn't figure out how). If you can pick this up for dollar or two (or your local equivalent) maybe give it a shot but at a AA price, laughably no.