Operation: Forge the Deep

4/10 A 3D puzzle where you rotate cubes to get them to connect with the thickest lines. Good: - free - the puzzle corresponds to a real-life scientific goal of designing strong metals, and the play data is supposedly used to assist this So-so: - music is okay-ish - art is okay-ish Bad: - controls are just horrible. You have to press Space to enter "cube selection mode". Instead a simple left-click should select a cube. To rotate the structure, you need to hold WASD (actually, I'd flip the X rotation). Instead, right mouse button drag should rotate. No way to drag camera (this should have been the middle mouse drag and the WASD/arrow keys). - when rotating a cube, the thickness of its connectors with other cubes changes. But it's unclear what this thickness depends on, nor how your drags actually change the rotation. It ends up being just random drags. That's neither interesting nor satisfying. I ended up just pressing Auto every time to get thru this, but then the game doesn't make sense at all - while rotating, the resulting strength of the connections isn't shown, it's only shown after you finish a move and release the mouse. Instead, it should have been updated every frame. I suppose the formula isn't really that huge there, so there won't be lags from this - the UI design is not nice, with Arial font, differently sized text, poorly placed dialogs etc - the whole story text is voiced but unprofessionally (guess it's the scientists themselves?). Volume varies greatly and there are background noises which come when you don't have pro equipment for sound recording. The bored voices make you lose interest in the story and not care about the game. Pro actors with some energy would make it more engaging - the story is hard to understand. I guess they aren't writers either - I encountered a bug(?) where, after completing level 1 and exiting back to level selection, the game just starts the tutorial again, and shows level 1 as locked It's a laudable attempt, and I understand the importance of science, and I even specifically searched for science-themed games in the previous years. But it's really hard to make it both beneficial and fun. [table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]