Way of Rhea

Beautiful artwork and puzzles that really take some thinking, but not in a painful way.

Quick Description: -Way of Rhea is a well made puzzle platformer that offers about 5-6 hrs of challenging content (I played for about 2 hrs in offline mode). This isn't the most well polished puzzler on the market and could use a few QOL additions, but fortunately, the core gameplay is quite good. The puzzles in this game offer a fair, but challenging difficulty curve. Hardcore puzzle fans will probably find this game to be on the easier side, where as I started to struggle a tad as I hit the final chapters of content. It's harder than Blobun, but easier than Patrick's Parabox imo. Consensus: -Solid Game (Tier 3 and makes up 35% of my reviews). I really enjoyed this one. It's probably a tad steep at $15, but I snagged this at 50% off and am very happy with my purchase. This game was made by one dev, which is even more impressive. Puzzle fanatics that are looking for their next game, Way of Rhea is a solid choice, worthy of your time.

[i]I received a free key for this from the developer.[/i] I'm not usually into platformers, but this was a neat puzzle one that doesn't require platforming skill (ie. no jumping). It had neat puzzles with different ways to open doors and a "sidekick" that made some puzzles get pretty hard with his "help." There are checkpoints at the beginning of each puzzle and you can undo each action which is really nice. Some puzzles got very challenging but it was rewarding finally getting them. There's also a cute story to go along with the game. There are also secrets that I haven't done yet, and it has a bunch of stats of your game (like how many undos you took) if you like that.

I loved the puzzles, really challenging but possible to work out.

The characters are pretty cute but the puzzles get really old really fast.

A puzzle game about using colored staves/orbs to open matching colored gates. Best puzzles have to be any with the crab! Figuring out how to guide the crab through a level always felt satisfying. The option to fast forward is great, as I did not have to spend time waiting for characters to get to their destination. Music is good too.

Overall good puzzle game with a neat colour-changing mechanic. I think people are overestimating the difficulty in the comments, I'd say most puzzles range from easy-medium with a few more difficult ones. Most are very enjoyable though. Negatives: 1. (this is the big one) - on certain levels you work together with another character Snow Crab that just constantly moves forward. This is in itself is not a problem, but it turns the "reverse last move" option virtually meangless because it counts both your moves and snow crab. You stood there thinking for 15 seconds - ok you got 50-70 moves to reverse. It is just faster most of the time to simply reset the entire checkpoint. 2. Related to the previous note - the visual & auditory ques for teleportation when working with snow crab is SO distracting. Had to turn the sound effects off - although no way to do that with the flashing effect. 3. At some levels you deal with teleports that can go up and down. All teleports also have a switch to in theory call the elevator back. Although it only works for some elevators in some levels. How does the game let you know if an elevator can be called back? It doesn't. There were a few levels I tried to beat one way only to learn the elevator couldn't be called up/down. 4. I experience a bug several times in the mush biome (and the similar biome in the final act) that totally crashed my PC had to hard reset it or everything. The only thing that worked was to turn the music off as the music getting "stuck" seemed to trigger it. Note: Don't let this somewhat lengthy negatives section discourage you too much. It is a rather long bit of text, but I liked the game.

Super fun puzzle game with a novel concept for puzzling. Had a ton of fun beta testing and just waiting to forget the solutions to the puzzles to do another run through now that it's released!

This is a game about a shrew buddy who is so proud of you he is willing to bet his motorcycle that you can finish all of the puzzles in the forest in one night, and shrew buddy LOVES his motorcycle. An absolutely charming set up for solid puzzler. The puzzles consist of color coded doors and teleporters and elevators, while juggling around orbs and staves of various colors to open said doors. The nature of the puzzles and color based mechanics brings to mind She Remembered Caterpillars, and I think that's a pretty reasonable touchstone for Way of Rhea - the perspective and other specifics are different, but it requires a lot of the same general sort of shuffling-things-around-in-the-right-order logic. Some of the puzzles involve the help of a snail buddy. He's not great at puzzles, so he just walks in a straight line interacting with everything possible until he turns around and repeats the process. While I found the snail puzzles satisfying to complete, the process of getting there was a bit frustrating. He generates a lot of sound effects, and, if you don't change the options, controller vibration and screen shake. I didn't think to turn those off until a few puzzles in with the little dude, and I was just about to lose my mind trying to solve the rather difficult puzzles with the sensory overload he produces. Turning off vibration and screen shake made it much more palatable, though I still had some difficulty concentrating. Regardless, as I said, the puzzles were satisfying, and a few had me feeling quite clever when I solved them. It's also worth mentioning that the amenities you really want in this sort of state-heavy puzzler are present -- rewinding and resetting to the previous checkpoint. Way of Rhea also does a good job of easing you into the general concepts needed for each mechanic with a show-don't-tell approach. The art and music live up to the charm of the premise. Simple, but effective. I think that's about all I have to say. It's a cute and satisfying puzzler and worth a play for fans of the genre.

Update: the time reversal element of the game is helped by the time controls. I did not realise it was possible to pause time, so thanks for the developer informing me of that. That's what I find hard in time-based puzzles is the lack of ability to stop and think, so it's great that in this game you can do that after all. ----------------------------- I was really enjoying this up to the end of the first three levels. The first three levels were not time-pressured, but straight after that the next set of levels were all about timing and the game stopped being fun and relaxing, because suddenly there's a constant feeling of pressure from the timing aspect. I don't know whether later levels are timing-based, but I can't get to the later levels without doing the timing ones. I hate games where that rely on getting the correct timing. So it's really disappointing when a cute game like this, with pretty and cleverly-designed puzzles, suddenly becomes timing-based.