Recommended by Jeff Hinschberger. Owned on Humble Bundle / Steam.

I got about seven hours in (maybe halfway?), the last few while I had Covid in early 2024, decided I “got it,” and looked up the endings. This one is interesting because it's clearly got the ingredients of something I like: Clever puzzles that reuse a small set of core concepts, teaching through design, a weird philosophical sci-fi story slowly revealed through epistolary text. But it got to feeling like a grind, and I didn't want to keep going.

I agree with Zarf's take that there are some serious design footguns mixed in with all the good stuff. For me the first thing was the amount of “manual” labor involved in solves - like, a lot of running to no purpose. Besides complaints about the scale of the overworld(s) I was quickly hitting a point where getting oriented in a new maze would take a while, and then I'd know the solution to a puzzle, but executing it would be another five minutes of running back and forth through the maze juggling tools. It made me wish for a bird's-eye view mode that let me implement my solution more like a chessboard. And… scanning negative reviews, it sounds like I quit just in time, and the last third of the game is actually much worse in this respect.

My other complaint is that rewards are too sparse. The UI that directly tells you it will be another 5-7 puzzles before the next meaningful unlock was actually kind of frustrating - if you did the same thing on a Mario World-style map, at least every level would unlock the next level. I didn't mind the tetronimo tangrams so much but they do feel like filler. And I felt like I'd hit the critical plot points, so having a gauntlet of fifteen red (difficult) puzzles ahead of me without much of a carrot besides maybe another gauntlet of puzzles before an ending left me fed up.