I honestly didn't enjoy my time with Aqorel too much and I feel a bit bad about it. I can see the passion that went into making the game, but ultimately I was happy when it was finally over. The game is really slow and on top of that, the puzzles are often quite tedious and involve a lot of back and forth to the point where I already solved the puzzle in my head but had to still execute it which, more often than not, just took too much time. I also found the throwing mechanic to be a bit janky, but that could very well be because I played it on the Steam Deck.

Also, I am still a bit confused about the theme of the game. It is a game about mixing colours, but also about food and they don't really go well together. Why am I colouring an orange? I feel like concentrating on one of those themes could have helped the game.

Aqorel is a very pleasant game to look at. It has a papery filter over everything, there are nice physics with the objects you can play around with, and the color palette is great.

However, it's not that nice to... listen to... The music is composed of very short loops with jarring instruments and unmelodic riffs.

The puzzles of the game itself ramp up in difficulty very slowly, and never quite reach a point of being cleverly challenging. The hardest levels were the ones where it looked like there were a ton of things going on, while in reality there is a pretty linear path to the goal.

It's a short game, and none of the puzzles were outright bad, just sometimes too simple or too much in favor of adding complexity without driving towards that satisfying cleverness of a good puzzle.