The Bigger Picture

This game's main mechanic is pretty cool, but almost everything else feels sadly clunky. I'm leaving a positive review despite my negative experience because this is a small game, from a new dev, and my intent isn't to discourage them. The levels are too big, and the player too slow. These things combined make the experience long and drawn-out. This is a puzzle game, but most of the time is spent walking instead of thinking. The puzzle elements are pretty simplistic and don't feel very good to use. The trampolines especially just add to the slow feeling, needing to bounce repeatedly to get higher because you gain such little height each time. The pipes are mostly okay, except when they're used as an obstacle or timing challenge and the punishment is doing even more walking. The fans are fine (though you can get stuck at the top when you need to go higher). The levers are alright, but I wish there were more colours to properly separate which ones do what, and some indication of what platforms are controlled by which levers. The pushable blocks almost never needed to be pushable, because they're almost always only used once in a level. The arrow signs were mostly just annoying to remember to use (it feels like simply changing the aspect ratio of the camera on those levels might work better). A major annoyance for me though is the involuntary nature of the puzzle elements. If you touch a pipe, you go through it. If you nudge a lever, you switch it. If you touch a power outlet, you plug/unplug it. It makes navigating through the levels annoying, because you need to constantly be wary of activating things, and since it's a 2D game it's not always easy to just walk around elements. Using an interact button for some or all of these elements would make it much more manageable in the tight spaces of the game. I wish there was more exploration of these elements in ways that played with the main mechanic and each other more. The level where you use a fan to push a box off a ledge was the most I really saw the mechanics interacting. Because of this, none of the levels felt puzzling, I was able to see the solutions immediately, the biggest roadblock was just remembering which levers did certain things. As for the collectables, I grabbed a few, but ended up skipping a lot of them because they were so out of the way and I knew it would take me ages to go all the way to them and then come all the way back. This is another consequence of the levels being too big. And one minor note is that the tilemap isn't set up properly - tiles that have ground below, left, right, and down-left, but air down-right, consistently use a mismatching tile. Overall, this game began to feel like it was overstaying its welcome because it wasn't showing me anything new or challenging and was taking up a lot of time. I got up to Level 13, ran into a softlock, and stopped playing. This game is neat, but it feels like it should have gotten more playtesting and refinement before being pushed to Steam. Though it's still better than a lot of things on here, so I hope the dev keeps up the hard work and I wish them the best.

A lovely little platformer/puzzle and a good way to spend a couple of hours collecting the ukuleles :)

This is a cute little game built around an interesting mechanic. The first couple of levels are great fun, as there are a few nifty little easter eggs to find as well. And for only $2, that's honestly pretty good. It feels like a Flash game I might find on Kongregate or ArmorGames back in the late 00s. That said, this game is really tedious, has at least half a dozen softlocks (and the only way out is to restart - no way to only reset your position from what I could tell), and doesn't really grow after the first handful of levels; once you've seen the moving pipes, the trampolines, and the fans, you've seen all the game has to offer. I think this is a game best enjoyed only a few levels a day at most. Tragically, I simply beat all the levels in one sitting, so the slowness of the player character, simplicity of the puzzles, and all the softlocks have grated on me a bit. Still, I'd recommend this. I'm sure it'll be nice for me to rediscover buried in my Steam library some months or years down the line, once I've forgotten about the rough bits. It's a pleasant game, but it's easier for the downsides to outshine their opposites in my memory.