U.V.S. Nirmana

It is impossible to talk about this game without comparing it to the original zach-likes. My opinion is that this game has the same feel as the originals but does not have the same kind of polish. I do not mean that the game lacks visual polish, I love pixel art in general and I feel like discovering the next piece of gorgeous background art was one of the main drivers behind me finishing the game in 3 days. I also enjoyed the flavour text at the start of each level, it all had a nice sci-fy feel about technology beyond our understanding. However, I felt somewhat dissapointed that the lore stayed mostly a vibe of the location rather than an actual story. I experienced it as kind of a plot-twist when the final few missions revealed that we were actually traveling *somewhere*. The puzzles are kind of circuit builders if the circuits contained water instead of electricity (in the sense that you can route it but you cannot split it) with extremely limited ability to store information between timesteps. I have to echo the sentiment of other reviewers that each puzzle appeared like it had only a single solution. The system still left room for player optimization, you could figure out what parts you could cut or how to optimize for different metrics (which I enjoyed doing for all puzzles, especially optimizing height). But I did feel that every solution had the same core idea and I could almost always reach the top scores in the histogram if I tried, something that was not true at all for other zach-likes. This is what I mean when I say the game lacks some polish, some polish in the logic of the game itself, it is enjoyable but feels like it is missing a deeper layer. All together I enjoyed my time with this game and will likely still finish the bonus campaign in the future. However I feel like the game price is rather steep for what it offers and likely wont be returning to this game after finishing it.

fun puzzles, amazing art + atmosphere, runs perfectly on a 10 year old netbook