Senna and the Forest

The only real downside of the game is that at times, you have to shuffle names around because not enough info is given. Otherwise, it has a good story, and the puzzles change, so it doesn't get stale. Also, going to the trees/flowers/so on to talk to them is understandable, but having to go to them to assign names/colors/so on feels unneeded.

I don't want to leave a negative review here. I tried really hard to like this game! [i]But.[/i] First there's a lot of guesswork in the first few parts. For the task of reconstructing family trees, there are several cases where it's clear that two candidates are siblings, but it's impossible to tell which one is which, short of trying both and seeing what the game accepts. This wasn't a one-off issue; it happened a lot. Then, the third section is kind of a disaster. It involves truth-tellers and liars, a logic puzzle format I love, but it's written badly, in several ways: [list] [*]As with the previous sections, there's often guessing, where you can narrow down a rune to "it's one of the blue ones" but there's no indication which. [*]Worse, there are often multiple solutions to the truthteller/liar puzzles even without those ambiguities; there was one case where I could tell the author [i]meant[/i] for you to assume one statement was true and deduce things from it, but you got an entirely different but perfectly consistent answer if you assume the opposite. [*]And finally, nitpicky though this might be, it's just careless. On the way into one section, a blue tree tells you "All the blue trees here tell the truth"--but why should I believe that tree? If you want to set objective rules, you have to separate the rules from the game itself. In another case, after you deduce that A is lying, B tells you, "A always disagrees with me. What do you expect from a liar like that!" But "That truthteller disagrees with me" is tantamount to saying "I'm a liar", which is a paradox. The author [i]intended[/i] you to take the statements as a whole and get nothing more than "B says A is a liar; but since A is a truthteller, B is lying", but that's not how it's presented. [/list] There are quality-of-life issues: many of the trees you talk to give you information to solve the puzzles, and many just give you plot and backstory. That's fine on its own, I like getting backstory...until I need to double-check what someone said about X and Y and I have to go through six trees, five of which are flavor and one of which had the information I needed. Some kind of icon to distinguish "has information" from "has backstory" after you've talked to them would have helped a lot; or, even more, a way to mark a tree as "I have what I need and don't need to talk to this one again". And frankly, the backstory was muddled. Bhumi is a goddess who...loves the trees? Abandoned the trees? Humanity made everything worse, or maybe it wasn't ever their fault because they all died in a calamity? Honestly it was hard to follow. It's a shame that my only rating options are "yes" and "no", because this game is...a 6 out of 10? Some genuinely enjoyable parts. But overall, would I recommend it? Sadly no.

The Lorax simulator

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☀️

[h1]Before I played Senna and the Forest, I had a small pp, no friends, no gf, depression, and no life. These things havent changed, but the game is pretty good[/h1]

Senna and the Forest is a neat short puzzle game about identifying entities (trees, flowers, pillars, whatever) by the hints they give you. Once you've assigned or guessed three entities correctly, they're verified and locked in. It's essentially a very limited form of the guess mechanic in Return of the Obra Dinn, though Senna obviously doesn't have the story, atmosphere, or polish of that game. I liked that the puzzles were of moderate difficulty while still often requiring note-taking to solve. Conversely, I was a bit annoyed that it seemed like I had to guess slightly on quite a few occasions, though I think this was intentional, since the number of required guesses was always very low. As in: here are two trees, and I have two names to assign, so I just have to try both combinations. Also, there's only a skeleton of a story, but it has no real payoff; the ending to the final chapter 4 is very abrupt, with no epilogue.