Bright Paw: Definitive Edition

I was torn on whether to recommend this game or not. After doing some of the end-game Theo's Dreams content, I'm confident in not recommending it. I bought the game several years ago. I tried to play it many times but it just wouldn't play on Linux. Then a recent update added Steam Deck support! Great, I would finally get to solve puzzles as a cat. A major update after years is a definite point in the developer's favour. The main game wound up being a very mixed bag. The gameplay was limited and almost every "puzzle" was trivial. You choose from several possible moves but, if there are only one or two valid moves, then there's no thinking required. Even worse, you have five available move cards but sometimes a puzzle takes 10+ moves to finish. If you don't know what moves are coming up, it's impossible to plan ahead, making it less puzzle and more blindly hoping things work out. Luckily (due to the limited number of valid moves) that's usually the case. Aside from the puzzles, there's a hidden object search mini game on each map. But you know how many things there are to find, so you just search at the start of each level and you will find every single one by the time you end the game. It's an okay idea which devolved into busy work. The strongest part of the game was the narration which was well-acted and interesting. But it's let down by a fairly poor story which never really explains much and isn't resolved by the end of the game. In fact, the story gets really confusing because the narrator starts out as a normal narrator, then later becomes a character. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be a plot twist but it just didn't make sense and was extremely jarring. That said, I was at least entertained. But then there's the (extra) Theo's Dreams puzzles. I am going through them purely for the achievements. When I started doing them, all the good feelings I got from the narration disappeared as the major flaws with the game became apparent. There is no narration in the extra puzzles, so the gameplay has to stand alone. It simply can't. The early sequences were trivially easy but some of the later ones suffered from massive difficulty spikes. Suddenly I had to try the assist mode and, in at least two places, a walkthrough. Why? Because many mechanics are poorly explained or inconsistent. Once again, we have the impossible situation of planning our moves when there are robots whose pathing is unknown ahead of time. Not to mention moveable blocks that are almost impossible to see and (maybe this is a Steam Deck rendering issue) do not always highlight as selected depending on the camera angle. One puzzle was made of multiple blocks that needed to be moved but you can only see how the blocks possibly move while actually selecting it! It's artificial difficulty from poor controls. In the end, the narration is the strongest aspect of the game but the story and gameplay are both poor. There was some definite potential and a few nice ideas but the implementation was not there.