Induction

The replay it shows of your solution after solving a puzzle is pretty cool.

One of the puzzle greats. I'm talking Stephen's Sausage Roll, Snakebird, Baba Is You, Magicube, etc. You liked those games? You'll love this. Of all of those puzzle games, I think Induction takes the cake for being the hardest to make sense of what you're doing, at least while mechanics are still being introduced and haven't had time to settle. It's like that scene from Tenet: don't try to think too hard about it, just [i]feel[/i] it. Indeed, by the end of the game you'll have developed a sort of second-nature to how go about solving these time conundrums. When the developer said it will rewire how you think about cause and effect - they weren't joking. Pair that with the fact that mechanics are rarely tutorialized beyond dropping you in a room and giving you a button prompt, part of the puzzle of Induction often becomes figuring out what [i]exactly[/i] it is that that new mechanic you just learned a few levels ago [i]actually does at a conceptual level[/i] so you can exploit it to its fullest. Induction has no wasted space - almost to a fault, however. While every single puzzle is top notch, I feel like there easily could have been several more late-game puzzles added to it to extend the game's length. The difficulty spike between the last and second to last puzzles seems strong evidence of this, especially because that last level makes use of essentially two new mechanics, each of which could have easily generated more puzzles on their own. [spoiler]That being the collectible that lets you shift time 5 times instead of the previous 3, and also the idea of standing on one of your clone's head, which as far as I recall was never a necessary part of a puzzle solution before that point, despite being something you could do from the beginning.[/spoiler] The isometric art style as well as the fact that the buttons do not show you what paths they will activate before you interact with them do make it a little difficult to discern exactly how certain puzzles are rigged up, but this is rarely that big of an issue. Just know that a fairly small amount of your time will be spent figuring out how certain levels are rigged up. In my opinion, I actually think this aspect works to the game's benefit, because it gives you sort of a meta-level goal when you first open a level that helps prevent you from getting overwhelmed. You don't need to figure out how to get to the exit just yet, you just need to figure out how to get to that button so you can figure out what it does. And in figuring out how to get to that button, you're already on your way to solving the entire puzzle. In some puzzles, it sort of fragments the level into multiple micro puzzles that you can solve that all accumulate into the larger puzzle. This is how I felt especially of the last puzzle, where a key bit of information on how the puzzle was even possible was not immediately accessible without having solved half the puzzle already. One minor gripe I have with the game is that (since it is real-time and not turn-based) you will sometimes just have to press a button down to pass time while your clones are doing actions and wait for "your turn" to do something. For the first 3/4 of the game, this is rarely an issue as the amount of time you are usually waiting for is very small. But with some puzzles (and especially that last puzzle) you could be sitting there holding a button down for a dozen seconds or more. This time accumulates pretty quick when you're bound to get certain things wrong on your first attempt and then have to undo and retry, forcing you to hold that button and wait for a dozen more seconds, and then a dozen more. It rarely affected my enjoyment of the game; that last puzzle is still one of my favorites. And again, it's only really noticeable on some of the later puzzles, and I'm not exactly sure if there was a better way this could have been implemented, as time is such a core part of how these puzzles are rigged up. All in all, if you're up for a challenge, Induction is a great brain-buster that is worth your time and every penny.