[b]3/10[/b]
Sync-move three gems at once to reach their target place, old idea enhanced by a few new mechanics, but terrible QoL and tedious levels make it a bad game.
[b]What is it:[/b] A puzzle game in which you have to move three gems on their target spots. All gems move as you push an arrow key, unless they are blocked by an obstacle. The difficulty is in finding the right walls to push against to separate the gems and guide them to their target spot. It’s an old idea, seen in many games, so what makes this one stand out? Other than the base mechanics of gems, walls and target spots, new mechanics include colored barriers that only let the same color gem through, one way teleporters, and a helper rock that can either move with the gems or stay in place, like a movable wall.
The gameplay is classic, the mechanics are interesting, and the levels are not that bad. Yet, I think the game is really lackluster, mainly because of terrible QoL, deliberate useless delays, and levels that are more tedious than clever.
From the start, there’s no menu or intro screen, you’re dumped right into the first tutorial level, then the first “temple room”. There’s no exit button, you can only close the game with Alt+F4. The only non-playing screen is a pause/settings/help dialog that shows up when pressing Esc, with a volume slider and a redundant mute toggle, a fullscreen switch and a resolution slider with no labels (which resolution is selected?) and instant change, so using the slider moves the whole thing under the cursor, making it really hard to control. The level select (temple room) is a bad gimmick, in order to open a level you have to actually play the game and maneuver the three gems into the right slot, which could be nice, I’m not against unique, immersive level selects, but it’s more annoying and cumbersome than interesting; trivial to do, but it takes many seconds out of your time when all you want is to play the next level. In a level, there’s no Undo, which is terrible in this type of game, one bad move and you have to either restart the whole thing or replay a lot of moves to get back to the previous state. Once you solve it, there’s a 4 seconds delay until it acknowledges your win, unless you have sound on and notice the congratulatory chime that plays. But between the moment you win and the moment it wipes the level, you can still move around, the first few times it did this I thought the game is broken and wouldn’t accept the solution. Then it starts a slow swipe down of the level, pause, swipe up back to the level select. And once you solve all the levels in a chapter, another slow and long animation happens, and yet another tedious maneuvering to get to the temple exit. I’m an impatient player, don’t waste my time with slow needless animations and interruptions! There’s no chapter select, except for the room selector room that you can reach when exiting the final temple room, and that one is badly done too: you can use it to get back to a previous room, but then you have to navigate through all the temple exits to reach it again.
And I said the level design is “not bad”, but that only covers the actual puzzles to solve, they are quite badly implemented. The game insists on having vertical levels, on a PC! There’s a lot of wasted space, to fit the narrow corridor that’s the actual puzzle, the level is padded with decorations, the elements are too small to properly fit, plus there’s the issue that the game tries to keep it’s pixel graphics crisp, which means that it only supports a few actual resolutions, padding to fit the screen, and on the Steam Deck it only uses 42% (!!!) of the actual screen, the rest is just black empty space. 42%! That makes it hard to see and ugly, on my 4K screen it’s nice and crisp and you can discern what those objects are, but on the Steam Deck it looks like fuzzy blobs of color, and it’s really hard to distinguish which is the gem, which is the target, and which are just colored walls. They’re all tiny blobs of color! And while the levels are unique and somewhat interesting, I prefer tight levels, with clever ideas in just enough space to fit the solution, but here the levels are too big, with plenty of space to just roam around, many of them with multiple solutions. Most of them weren’t clever, but tedious, the solution is obvious, but you have to execute many dozens of moves to move through the long corridors.
I was really looking forward to enjoying this game, but it was a real disappointment. It’s probably too late to fix this game, but a sequel could fix up a lot of the issues and be a success.
[b]How hard is it:[/b] Very easy to easy. Each chapter has 4-6 levels, with the last two a bit more difficult, but none takes more than 10 minutes to crack. I only had a bit of trouble with one level that required some thinking, the rest were just tedious work to move the gems closer to their spots one by one.
[b]How long is it:[/b] 30 levels in 6 chapters, 2-3 hours to finish. All levels in a chapter are unlocked, but opening the exit to the next chapter requires finishing all the levels in the current one.
[b]Level design:[/b] Meh. Good variety, none feels like a filler, but they are bigger than they need to be. I prefer tighter levels, more about thinking than making 100 moves just slowly getting the gems one by one where they need to be, but maybe that's just me.
[b]Quality:[/b] Quite bad. No undo, cumbersome level select without a quick way to open a level or select another chapter. Basic controls, and not rebindable. Barely any settings, and the ones it has are badly implemented. No cloud saving, a few progress achievements. Tedious navigation. No menu screen, no Quit button.
[b]Worth the price:[/b] No.
[b]Most positive aspect for me:[/b] A couple of interesting puzzles in each chapter.
[b]Most negative aspect for me:[/b] No undo.
[b]What would make it better:[/b] Undo! Add a home screen. Add a Quit button. Add a proper chapter select, accessible at all times from the home screen. Either have a plain level select, or make entering a level an actual challenge, right now it’s just tedious. Add a controller mapping for the Steam Deck, and make sure its resolution is properly supported. Make the resolution selection a dropdown menu with a list of supported resolutions, and remove the very low resolutions, the game is really unusable at those. Add cloud saving. Make it fast, shorten a lot all the transitions, and add a visual acknowledgement that the level is solved. Improve the graphics to better differentiate between gems, targets and walls, and between the teleporter entrance and exit.
As for the levels: turn them sideways, this is not a vertical phone game, make use of the longer width. Try to make them tighter, shorten corridors and walls where possible. Add more levels that require more thinking and better planning, the current ones are quite easy to brute force, focusing on one gem at a time. Remove the cruft, it’s OK to have decorations that make it look nicer, but don’t use walls for that.
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