Recommended with one major caveat.
Music's okay, story's whatever, I liked the art, the nonlinear world design is great, achievements are mostly fair, and a lot of the mechanics used are quite innovative and creative.
Most of the puzzles were quite nice, but I'm saying most here because two of the mechanics stand out as AWFUL- the stupid barrel shuffle minigame and the final boss.
The barrel shuffle minigame has the barrels move so fast by the second game that keeping track of them is genuinely hard... but that'd be fine even if it means that we'd lose if we blinked at the wrong time if there wasn't the issue with it being shuffled north to south, where most of a column can move up or down and conceal the movement of other barrels, meaning that it's very easy to lose track of the original barrel... and instead of being able to try again immediately, you have to keep on hitting barrels until you die from the bombs or get lucky, and if you die you're sent back to the start of the area. At least the area's optional... though that's definitely not obvious and the reward for beating the area is absolutely not worth it.
The final boss made me really consider giving this game a no. It's a five phase fight (far longer than any other fight in the game considering most bosses die once you complete the puzzle thrice instead of having 2 puzzles appear five times), but that wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the rng involved. The boss has a habit of yoinking your shield at the worst time leaving you undefended against the enemy you were trying to kill and unable to complete the puzzle until you get it back, which relies on the boss actually moving away from the shield instead of sticking around to summon a bunch more enemies, tossing their sword a few more times at you (they won't yoink your shield during this attack but they can do it after yoinking anyway, which means that the sword will explode into a bunch of projectiles you can't block, and the boss is able to swing at you during that attack so you can't reclaim your shield). The sword attacks during all five phases but especially during the fourth phase have a habit of destroying things you need even when you're nowhere near close to them, forcing you to go without a potion or restarting the puzzle, and if you do end up low on health you have to rely on randomly regaining hp from enemies or on potions falling from crates/summoned enemies. If you need to take a break to do something else, there's no quick transport back to the boss either, necessitating you teleport to the start of the final area, walk through it, go into the castle, and then recomplete the third floor because while the first two save your progress the third doesn't for whatever reason. This part was such a huge leap (in some cases literal) in difficulty and could have been handled far better.
Speaking of weird ♥♥♥♥ happening, there's other glitches too- some switches will save your progress, some won't. Standouts are the switch next to the first shop you see, the switch right above the starting area, the money switch in the shuffle minigame that randomly resets or stays locked, and the switches on the third floor in the final area. Most other switches stay permanently flipped, but these don't. There's other minor glitches too- force quits are decently common, you can go out of bounds at the entrance to the final area if you bring the hog (which I only know because I thought you were SUPPOSED to do that), and THE FINAL BOSS MIGHT NOT HAVE THE LAST PHASE COMPLETE IF YOU TAKE TOO LONG (I know this since I waited for the boss to spawn enough minions to get myself to full health, completed the puzzle... and then had nothing happen after that phase ended. I had to quit and then come back after a bunch more attempts to complete the fight, with no progress on the phases saved).
It might seem like I hate the game, but I'm more just very frustrated from the end. The mechanics used are genuinely innovative enough that I'll recommend the game anyway, but it's clearly very flawed and you should take the above into account. I hope it gets updated to fix these issues, but I'm not holding my breath.
