Sandy's Great Escape is a pretty and generous sokoban puzzle game. It's clearly a labor of love, but unfortunately I really didn't enjoy my time with it due to some deep design flaws.
Firstly, some things I liked about the game: The crab shell mechanic is genuinely interesting. The art is pretty and mostly very clear (except for crates in the snow biome, which look too similar to wall tiles). The game is obviously very polished. And the initial small & easy levels are reasonably enjoyable.
Secondly, some things I didn't enjoy, but that aren't dealbreakers: The music consists of short loops and quickly gets repetitive, to the point that I turned it off. And it's annoying that one can't undo/rewind past a level reset; I consider this a standard feature nowadays, and it's missing here.
Finally, we come to the design issues.
1) The theme is far too weak. The game is advertised as a "crabby twist on the sokoban (box-pushing) genre, where you use deaths to create shells and solve puzzles", but the emphasis is 99% on sokoban and misc. special tiles like conveyor belts, and only 1% on the shells. For example, thematically speaking, why are there normal crates in the game at all? Why not make them all shells? And in most levels you don't need to produce a shell at all. Overall it's just disappointing that the most unique mechanic of the game is so neglected.
2) The game is exhaustingly big. It features 100 levels, which is already a ton, but then even individual later levels are enormous and require 100-300 moves to complete.
In my favorite puzzle games (e.g. Patrick's Parabox, Yugo Puzzle), levels have a tiny possibility space and yet the solution seems unattainable. Solving these levels usually requires some epiphany, and thus both makes you feel smart and appreciate the dev's genius. Here, later levels are enormous, so the possibility space is huge and the challenge feels artificial. Upon solving such a level I felt exhausted and annoyed, rather than elated or impressed.
I ultimately looked up solutions for ~30/100 levels, and still spent 9h in the game.
3) Finally, the deepest flaw of the game is its par system. At its core, Sandy's Great Escape is an optimization puzzler that strongly encourages you to solve levels as efficiently as possible, i.e. to beat a level in a par number of moves. But this design has very poor compatibility with the rest of the game.
Firstly, the par goal discourages exploration. Instead of enjoying the crab movement and special tiles like conveyor belts, I would instead stare at the screen and try to solve the puzzle in my head. That's just not a fun experience. Whereas if I get stuck in a sokoban game without a par system, I can wander around and try random stuff.
Secondly, many levels are huge and the par requirements are mostly very strict, and thus many levels have a par goal of 120++ moves. That's just way too tedious to optimize. At the same time, a few levels have very loose pars: I solved 1-25 in 145 moves, vs. a par of 293. That feels incongruent. I wish the par goals instead had some significant buffer.
Thirdly, many levels (e.g. 3-12, 3-18) essentially consist of a few separate puzzle areas glued together. This further inflates the par move counts. Much better to have more but smaller levels, each featuring just one challenge and an attainable par.
Fourth, it's usually possible to beat par. But the game barely acknowledges that, so there's no incentive to improve a par solution. It's just disappointing to do something neat in a game and have it be unacknowledged.
Fifth, the move counter has some unintuitive aspects: gliding over a stretch of ice only takes 1 move, not one per tile; and bumping into a wall doesn't cost a move but can affect the solution, e.g. to move the ghost crab.
At this point I want to provide some constructive criticism on the par system. I used to dislike par targets in games, but was convinced otherwise by how brilliantly this mechanic works in "Dungeon and Puzzles" (see my review [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/MondSemmel/recommended/1229060]here[/url]). To make its par system work, the game does a bunch of extremely smart things which are missing here.
A) Levels are much smaller, which makes the par goals more manageable. Short levels are also just easier to replay.
B) There's a world map where you see many of your solved levels at once, *including how your solution performed relative to par* (e.g. +5, +0, or -3 moves). This provides an overview of your solutions, an incentive to improve ("I'm at +2! Surely I'll be able to shave off 2 moves somewhere?"), and an acknowledgment of solutions below par.
C) Par goals are more lenient, so *many* levels can be solved below par, *and the game acknowledges whenever you beat par!*.
D) Most levels are easy to solve if you ignore par, and some are even relatively easy to solve barely above par, but might require an entirely different solution to beat par. So a par solution might require an epiphany, which is fun.
E) The game offers a replay system where you can retry a level to beat your previous par score, and the game gives you access to your previous solution, so you can immediately iterate on that by undoing to any point mid-solution. Rather than going "huh, it's been ages since I solved that puzzle, and I don't recall how I originally did that, so how am I supposed to solve it more quickly?".
In conclusion, IMO Sandy's Great Escape would've been better with fewer and easier levels, a flatter difficulty curve, a much stronger emphasis on the great crab shell mechanic, and either no par system or at least an improved version of it. Unfortunately that's not the game I got, so I can't recommend it.
