Puzzle Sages

I normally hold myself to only writing a review of a game when I either beat it or decide I'm done with it forever. Usually, if I'm writing a review after less than an hour of playing, it's going to be very negative, because I'm done with it forever. In the case of Puzzle Sages, it's actually because I've already completed the game on Easy... but the review's still very negative. The game is divided into a "prologue" with three puzzle rooms, then a choice of difficulty, then six more puzzle rooms in any order, then one final puzzle room, for a total of 10 on any given route and 24 total. This is a bit frustrating, because you can't save the game until you've completed the first three puzzle rooms and selected your difficulty, yet the first three puzzles are going to be the same each time since you can't select your difficulty yet. Perhaps more worryingly, one of the easy puzzles (green) was triply bugged - it was not possible to complete without modifying the game files, due to an enemy getting stuck in place in a position you absolutely must cross, there was a certain enemy that would send you to a different version of that puzzle if it caught you instead of restarting the puzzle, and it left a dark rainstorm effect on everything for the rest of the game. The orange puzzle was also bugged, sending you to a different version if you made a mistake instead of restarting properly, but that didn't stop a player from completing the game. The fact that outright debug text showed up after I completed all six of the puzzles during the branching segment made me briefly believe that the game was left unfinishable, but there was actually a final puzzle and ending. As far as the puzzles themselves... the ones I saw weren't exactly inventive, but I only played through on Easy. There's push-the-block, dodge "monsters" that move in straight lines, ice skating, traverse a pattern without backtracking, simon, a choose-how-to-jump-down, a logic puzzle... I mean, it's probably just stuff someone who's played a puzzle game has seen before, which is good, because there's almost nothing in the way of instructions here. So yeah. Strictly amateur effort with a laughable non-plot, uninspired puzzles, and glaring bugs that render it unwinnable on at least one difficulty. Much like My First Unity Manshoot types, I don't really think this belongs on Steam, or sold for money at all, really. This level of effort and skill should really just be shown to friends and family and then filed away under practice for better things.