Alephant

A difficult puzzle game. Honestly I found it a little bland, as new concepts were not introduced very often. A lack of hint system means if you have trouble beating a puzzle that is required to progress, you're basically stuck at a brick wall unless you want to look up the entire solution. That doesn't necessarily mean the game is bad, I just don't enjoy it when I can't progress until I figure out the exact thing I have to do in one level.

At first, the game seemed quite bland (the first world). How much interesting interactions can be hidden in a simple match part A to part B ? It turns out: A lot! The simplicity of the puzzle enabled the game designers to make such beautifully intricate, yet comprehensible, level designs that I was in an absolute awe. Introduction of a new mechanics and the pacing was done masterfully in all of the intermediary levels. Additional 'talking ' challenges were an absolute masterpiece. Unfortunately, there is a long coming ". but...". The last world feels a little bit rushed in the development. There is no gradual progression in the understanding of the mechanics like in the middle worlds. In main line levels the level before usually hinted or at least allowed to easily experiment with the trick that was needed in the next one on the main line while still leaving an engaging puzzle to solve. This way the solution was not given on a plate but it didn't feel arbitrary either. This cannot be said about the last world. The first level in this world fells useless as it provides absolutely no information and room to experiment about the used mechanic and is not a challenge to solve either (maybe this puzzle was misplaced / has an overlooked mistake ?). Similar thing happens later. Both of these scenarios make puzzles after them to have a quite sharp spike in difficulty and pretty much require brute-forcing or stumbling on the solutions ( none of which feels rewarding). The outlined mechanic is not obvious (especially since it was not explicitly reinforced in previous worlds). That might be a me problem, but judging from the completion rates for the last world, this could have been the reason for many players to bounce off the title. That is a shame because the game has a really satisfying endgame with nice payoff and difficulty (once you beat through those two levels). TLDR; must play, really intricate puzzle design, simple rules masterfully woven into satisfying mechanics, introductory levels for mechanics absolutely perfect in all but the last world. first world is little too repetitive, but later the game picks up the pace (don't get discouraged it IS absolutely worth it).