Poke ALL Toads

There are more mysteries in Poke ALL Toads than you'd expect from such an innocent-seeming puzzle game. How does the blue fairy find these mysterious button-filled floating islands? Why do toads keep on getting marooned on them? What exactly is it about the goal of poking toads that makes it worth getting thrown, crushed, flung into outer space, trapped in a magic orb, and being eaten by an angry toad? And most mysterious of all, who is shooting lasers at these fairies? You start to feel like you are involved in some plot far greater than you can begin to comprehend, just one puppet in the blue fairy's game. There are a lot more puzzles than I expected there would be going in, and they are moderately difficult - hard enough to keep you engaged but designed simply and cleanly so that it is easy to find the main problem or challenge preventing you from finishing each level and experiment to find a solution. The main levels follow a mostly smooth difficulty curve, introducing a new fairy or toad in each world and adding more fairies and obstacles in succeeding levels that interact with the new one in novel and surprising ways that challenge the assumptions you develop about how to use each fairy and let you make use of new interactions you find with the toads and fairies. In one level, the new fairy's new feature might be essential to completing a level while in the next that fairy might have to become toad fodder for you to succeed - all in service of the blue ringleader. The care that went into the game's art is also impressive. The fairies have interesting interactions with each other and reactions to what happens in each level that make the game feel alive - the busy fairy will watch the blue fairy disapprovingly after she pokes a toad for a while before returning to her book, the strong fairy seems worried when she's about to throw another fairy to its doom, the brave fairy seems the opposite of that when she's being watched by the vengeful eye of a poked toad, etc. All of this makes it feel like you're actually doing something (poking toads) rather than just solving puzzles in which you happen to be moving around fairy-shaped pawns like how a lot of other puzzle games feel, and it also just gives the game a silly, low-stakes vibe that makes it hard to get frustrated at even the really hard puzzles. I will say though that the laser is probably my least favorite puzzle mechanic. It's kind of confusing to work around in the levels where it isn't indicated where the lasers are coming from, and when launchpads are used as indicators it adds visual clutter to the stages which contrast with the laserless stages which are easier to read. They are also just less interesting as a mechanic than the new fairies and toads introduced earlier, especially since a launch pad already does most of what they do. It was pretty funny though [spoiler]when they are first introduced with zero warning[/spoiler] and I still enjoyed solving the puzzles that included them. At the end of the day what matters is that there are toads that need poked and you need to buy this game and poke them.