Mind Over Magnet

very bland game all around, made with some polish but sort of just there. I like game makers toolkit but this game does not inspire. this game has no interesting ideas, a boring story, it just feels like a product. you can watch a 5 hour long dev log for this 2 hour long first time game dev but the game itself just does not stand out or on its own

Mind Over Magnet is an unexceptional puzzle platformer by Mark Brown of the fantastic YouTube channel Game Maker's Toolkit. I did not love it. The game is incredibly polished for what it is, but gave me the clear sense that a) the dev should've spent way more time in the prototyping stage instead of committing to build and ship this particular game, and b) this polishing effort was mostly wasted on this genre of puzzle platformers and would've paid much bigger dividends in other genres. As for the gameplay itself: it's very short, which I don't intrinsically mind. It's quite easy, which is also fine. Levels felt uninspired, however, and from what I recall they featured few "aha" moments, which was a bummer. Finally, something that frustrated me was that the game is ostensibly about magnetism and thus suggests it's a physics puzzler, but enough gameplay interactions are hard-coded that I sometimes found it hard to predict what would happen, because the visuals suggested a more physics-y response than what actually happened. Not recommended. This is not a terrible game, but also not one I would call remotely memorable or worthwhile.

I'm sad people were hard on this game for being "too easy". I have a very cognitively hard job, but still want the quiet chill pleasure of solving a puzzle. My brain doesn't have the capacity to hold all of the rules of Baba is You. This is hitting the spot perfectly.

Short little puzzle game. Generally simple but some puzzles want things that aren't really obvious unless you've already played it. For example a puzzle that wants you to jump up to a place that you normally shouldn't be able to reach. A moment like that makes the solution feel less clever and more brute forced. The puzzles near the end of the game don't offer that much challenge, the amount of things you can do with the mechanics given were exhausted by the time you reached the end and they weren't used to their fullest potential. But nonetheless it was a fun puzzle game overall albeit a little bit short.

An impeccably polished turd. Truly spotless and shined to perfection. I have to check out the developer's commentary. This tragic tale of uninspired passion could be the real work of art here.

It's neat but quite short and most of the puzzles have a straightforward solution that practically screams at you. Many interesting concepts to solve puzzles are introduced but then never re-used. I wish this had maybe one or two more worlds where you have to combine everything the game taught you to solve some non-trivial puzzles.

Full respect to Mark Brown and his youtube channel, but I think we need more honesty about Mind Over Magnet as a game. This is a very short game with an [b]extremely[/b] basic visual style and, if we're being fair, underwhelming mechanics. As an accessible puzzle game that hums along just shy of 'intermediate' difficulty, is it bad? No, I would not say it is bad. I would say it is uncompetitive in today's indie gaming scene, even at a deep discount (for me, 70% off).

Not a long game but a fun time. I’d say get it when it’s on sale

As someone who’s been watching the process on his channel I was optimistic that it would be a good game. However, most levels are, to be honest, quite boring. There’s little to no incentive to progress through the game. Most if the time it feels like a chore, not a challenge. The environment is rather bland and generic. Considering the creator has made a video about movement and an asset pack to help other developers with platformers, you’d expect this game to have more juice in it. The play forming is really barebones and the puzzles are neither challenging nor interesting. The difficulty is really swingy, where it sometimes gives the feeling that it’s ramping up, only to get back to the basics. The controls are inconsistent, I played through part of the game with D-pad only to realize that you need to use the joystick for aiming while throwing. As hinted before, the story is very basic, but might be interesting to a child, but then again a child wouldn’t be interested in unemployment(mentioned in the story), so it doesn’t feel like the target audience either. Over all, I’d say it’s an okay game. Neither good nor terrible. It feels like it’s the creator’s first game and I think they should be proud of it, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone to pay money for this let alone spend their time playing it. I wish the devs best of luck in their game dev endeavors.

I got this game on a heavy discount of around 3-5 dollars. If you can get this game on sale, then I would absolutely recommend it. The art is simple but cute. The puzzles themselves can be challenging at times, but nothing overwhelming complex or requiring unfair lateral thinking. However, the game is incredibly short, I played this game casually and still beat it in around 3 hours. Paying full price for this game just doesn't seem worth it. Overall, have to give respect for Game Maker's Toolkit. He had a vision for a game and he created it! Not too many people have the ability to accomplished what he did.