Impresja, for the first hour or so, will impres' ja' (pun entirely intended). Then for the next hour, it won't. And for the final remaining hour, it'll infuriate/bore you. It brought something new to the table, then it ruined itself with two annoying levels.
Part of the fun of Impresja is discovering the mechanics, as the game only tells you that you can move around with WASD, interact with the mouse buttons, and that the game saves automatically; after that it chucks you straight into the puzzles and you have to figure out what to do with it all. So I won't spoil what the big mechanics of the game are. However, it's very much related to non-Euclidean levels (which we all love!), and does produce a few nice puzzles based around it. I'll say this much, though: you can take paintings and put them onto easels and walls, and this does certain things things.
The first two puzzles were challenging and enjoyable. They stuck to themselves and didn't try to mislead the player. They presented a situation involving the mechanics of the game, and required logical reasoning to get through. The mechanics themselves were also presented clearly and were fairly-introduced. This is good. The developer should read this and keep that in mind for the next game.
The bad level design starts to show in the next puzzle, however. This one's in two parts, and both have annoying red herrings that have no bearing on the puzzle whatsoever, but are instead put there for you to seemingly waste your time on. Let's just say this: in this game, pillars can be reconfigured in certain ways, but in both parts of this third puzzle, a great deal of these pillars *look* as though they should be configured in one way (involving point-of-interest A), whereas in fact point-of-interest A isn't part of the solution to the puzzle. At all. And the pillars that are *actually* used are a different set from the ones in the point-of-interest A configuration. Why not simply *remove* point-of-interest A, and the unnecessary pillars?! Red herrings in a game are almost always unfair! Even worse, the actual solution to the puzzle involves using something that *isn't* a pillar to connect the two parts, which is completely counter to one's expectations.
Further, at this point, the fact that you HAVE to place paintings onto specific points on the wall (and never on the floor) means that in this puzzle, you'll end up wandering around trying to find the one specific spot on the wall where you can place a painting so that you can free up your hands to shuffle paintings back and forth. Combined with the slow walking speed and long passageways, this becomes a bit of a chore. Oh, and you also have to backtrack all the way through the first and second levels to solve this one. I would *never* design a level that took this long to complete or which mislead the player this badly. While it's cool that the puzzle *does* use elements from the previous levels, the problem with backtracking is that it takes too long to get through those previous levels.
Either way, supposing you do indeed manage to solve that level, you're then presented with a fairly easy puzzle next. A puzzle that in fact would have fit perfectly as the first puzzle in the game, were it not for the inter-level interplay. Though now that I say that, I'm not entirely convinced about it; it feels to me like restructuring the game to make that the next puzzle would actually be a lot easier than I initially thought. Either way, this puzzle was still enjoyable and I'll praise the developer for it.
So now you're at the fifth puzzle, which introduces its mechanic well and is fun. Again, praise to the developer for this one, huzzah!
Then you get to the sixth puzzle. And this is where the level design goes straight out the window. This puzzle involves a circular corridor, with entrances on the inside of the corridor leading into rooms, and one-way drops on the outside coming from... well, that's one issue. Only one of those one-way drops can actually be accessed; the rest are all useless and probably shouldn't be there. But more pressingly, there are a total of 8 rooms on the inside of the corridor, and you have to move paintings between these rooms to complete the puzzle (and finish the game). The problem is that you can't see what's in these rooms until you're right in front of the entrance, and with the slow walking speed it takes ages to get from one room to another. Further, moving the wrong painting to the wrong room is a mistake and will likely need to be undone.
The way *I* would have designed this level is to instead have the circular corridor be a central room, with exits leading out to the 8 rooms. The one-way drop could be a drop from the ceiling, and the main exit out from the corridor could be marked differently. That way, the player can see all the rooms at once and can see what's in each room, so there's now no need to run around the corridor for literal minutes, trying to find the right painting and the right room.
Even having done that, the puzzle itself is still pretty tedious and probably needs to be nerfed. Basically, moving the paintings allows you to move the statues in the rooms from one room to another. The problem is that they need to be moved in a specific order between rooms, and there's only ever one statue-less room to move a statue into.
Despite all this ridiculousness, I was still hoping for more good quality puzzles after this one. But then the game ended straight after, leaving me unsatisfied and wanting more puzzles with good level design. Why couldn't you have had more puzzles based on the mechanics of the first two?! I really liked those puzzles; they showed such promise and got me to really think about them! Instead, you gave me puzzles that were overcomplicated and badly-presented. The difference between the good puzzles and the bad is quite truly night and day here.
At the time of writing, the other negative reviewer on this game thinks that the developer forgot to have their game playtested. I think it's definitely possible that the four levels I mentioned that were good WERE playtested, because they were honestly good levels; they were well-thought-out and were fun. But I can't help but feel that the other two puzzles *didn't* have playtesters test them, and so the game's suffered badly as a result. Had those two levels been cut out entirely, I wouldn't just give this a positive rating; I would wholeheartedly recommend this to my puzzler friends.
In short, Impresja is a good and ambitious game at heart, but 1/3 of its levels mar it with overcomplicated design, red herrings, and bad presentation. It has good mechanics and good introductions to the mechanics, but fails to follow through with enough good levels to match. Get it only if you have a lot of patience.
If the developer is willing to completely replace the offending levels, I'd be very happy to update this review as required, because I really really wish this game were better and did well as a result. But as it is now, it's a "Not Recommended" from me.
EDIT: Also, shame on the developers of Flow Match (now known as Soko Match) and Rolling Shapes, because their games are literally Satan's diarrhoea.
