Pipe Push Paradise

[h1]Overall = 8/10[/h1] A pipe pushing plumbing puzzle game with a very relaxed and laid back atmosphere. The puzzles are difficult but good as they slowly bring in new mechanics without explaining them, letting you have those ‘AHA!’ moments yourself. The graphics are simplistic and clearly show each of the elements, but some more details could have made exploring the island more interesting. The characters and narrative also feels a bit pointless and the map isn’t very informative as it doesn’t show you which puzzles you’ve unlocked. The bright colours and music adds to the idyllic charm of the setting and as every move is tracked, it’s easy to undo mistakes or restart levels but having an in-game hint system would have been nice to help you when you’re completely stumped. It’s a great game which keeps on giving as even after completion, there’s additional puzzles to complete and tricks to learn which was nice. Using a controller I found I kept double stepping, so recommend using a keyboard instead.

This is a really simple, fun, and challenging sokoban-like. The game is fairly straightforward. What you can and cannot do never gets too crazy, and most of it is fairly obvious and intuitive. Many of the puzzles are fairly simple, but some definitely made me scratch my head for a bit. The graphics are super simple, but I really enjoyed them for their uniqueness. The music is really appropriate. Feels like what you'd hear on an island like this. And it feels really raw and unprocessed, but still really good. The game went really smooth and quick. I rarely got stuck, and when I did, I would just pop over to another puzzle for a bit and come back, and solve the problem puzzle fairly quickly. However, my progress ground to a halt at Catapult. I cleared every other puzzle in this area and just couldn't get it. I spent way more time than I should have on this one. I would pop back in for 15 or 30 minutes periodically and quit out of frustration. I popped on one time before bed, just to mess around. And immediately saw something I hadn't seen and realized I was focusing on trying the wrong way for too long. Funny how these types of games work like that. Progress continued after that, and while some of the later puzzles took a bit, Catapult was really the only one that took a significant amount of time. Which is satisfying. Often in puzzle games, there are many puzzles that I get hung up on for an hour or two, which can be frustrating. Most of this games puzzles are simple enough to be solved between 1-30 minutes. I would say the only real drawback to this game is that it can be difficult at times to understand the game when it's vertical, which doesn't really become a problem until much later in the game. A simple grid marking block height along this axis would have mostly solved this issue. I spent some time working on a solution once, only to find out I couldn't do my solution because the pipes didn't fit quite correctly. Anyway, a really great puzzle game. I recently played SSR, so a game that is similar, challenging, but not insanely difficult was refreshing. Highly recommend it. Asking price is really fair, but if it's on sale and you like puzzle games, it's a steal. If you liked Bonefire Peaks, I just realized this is the same dev. Must be why it was in my library, because Bonefire Peaks is also a fantastic game.