Do some puzzles! It's good for your thinknut! And if you liked the previous Mewseum game, it's more of that! Come on! And if that doesn't mean anything, I get paid by the word* so you can bet I'm gonna explain it later on. Just stick it out for a bit.
[quote]Okay, realtalk moment: This is a review copy, I received the game some days before release. You're getting my raw, genuine thoughts, I am not bought the price of a game.[/quote]
The context of the game is "painting" movie posters. You "paint" by drawing boxes on tiny segments of canvas, each segment of canvas represents a tiny bit of a poster, and there's like 150 or so per poster. Any given bit of canvas has been taking me a bit over a minute on average.
Each of those segments is a standalone puzzle. The game is very playable in short sprints if you're on a tight time budget, though it'll take a few hours to get to the payoff of a completed poster.
Each bit of canvas is gridded, and has a smattering of numbers. You have to draw a rectangle around each number, so that the rectangle has the same area as the number and contains only that one number. So if there's a 12, you need either a 1x12, 2x6, or 3x4 rectangle. Most of the numbers will be single digits so you won't be doing nearly that much factorizing.
And that's basically it. It's a simple formula, and you are given some tools to help work out more complex puzzles (like drawing incomplete 'red' rectangles to mark out areas for later reference), but "bulldozing" a puzzle is possible, and I've done it a few times myself. I've found it's often faster, for me, to crush my way through than to artfully tease out the correct solution, but if you enjoy that sort of logical finesse, it's there for you.
Either way, it's meant to be a chill experience. Between the relative lack of dificulty, and the fact that it's not even keeping a timer on you, you can take as long as you like. Generic, "smooth" jazz plays in the background, the mellowest, most generic-sounding stuff I can think of. Seriously, it's got titles like "Jazz Guitar Relaxing Smooth Easy Music," or "Serene Jazz Romantic Relaxing Late Night Vibe." It is dreadfully generic stuff.
If this was made by a human, and represents a meaningful chunk of creativity, apologies for insulting your tunes. I'll easily concede that musical tastes are subjective, so take this with a grain of salt. The game needs some music to fill its otherwise extremely sparse soundscape, but I think I would have preferred something a bit more lively. Something evocative of movie themes, perhaps?
Regardless if or when the jazz gets to you, you can turn down or off altogether. You can just skip specific tunes if you like some of it more than others. The player's right there in the bottom left corner, tucked away but never totally hidden. Chef's kiss.
The default colour scheme lends itself well to eyestrain if you sit at it for two hours, as I did in my on-stream review playthrough. There's even a dark scheme, but I feel like it muddles things as there's a lot of darker grays involved. It's not that easier on the eyes, so I think some tuning on that front wouldn't go amiss.
But hey, listen, if that's the complaints I have (eyestrain, the Man Who Doesn't Like Mirror-Sheen Smooth Generic Jazz) then I guess you're doing alright as a game. The UX in the game is on point, there's subtle tones for errors and misclicks, the game runs responsively, and the biggest irritations can be solved without even leaving the game screen, and no bugs either. How nice is that?
Puzzle games can be pretty short affairs. By my reckoning, it took me over four hours and a bit to get 1.5 posters completed. By my math, I'm good for 16 hours total, perhaps more if the puzzles get harder. That's pretty decent for anything that's so overtly puzzley.
If you're still on the fence about all this, I recorded my first two hours with the game, and it's parked on Youtube. Go give it an eyeball, amuse yourself with the chats I'm having with my wife, get a gander for the gameplay (I do a lot of explaining in the opening minutes).
We're down in the mines of this wall of text. I tend to write a lot, and often times a single draft, so this is one of the times my review has seen haha, some review. If you like this sort of thing and you're down here, still reading, then you're my kind of person. So a little secret: I stream on a regular basis, I've got a curator, and there's even a Discord if that's your jam. All the info is in my profile, which is as close to advertising as I can make myself do. You can consider yourself welcome.
And, in conclusion, this is a fine, if not easy game. The game plays well, the UI is responsive, and apart from the music (which you can turn off) I can't really say a single thing bad about it. It lends itself well to short stints too, and you get a cat reference (or six) so what's not to like?
* Nobody pays me for any of this. More's the pity.
