The Dungeon Rules is a genre-mash of sokoban, roguelike, and dungeon crawler, which as a fan of some of those things, is pretty wild! I was surprised that this could work. The combat gameplay is vaguely reminiscent of Slay the Spire, while not holding up to that masterpiece, it is still serviceable and encourages you to put some thought into your card playing. The sokoban aspects are also serviceable, however, and this is a big however, there is a lot of potential for softlocks. Because there is no undo button, every move is final, which is typical for a roguelike, but frustrating for a sokoban. On the very first level, I got a box trapped in a corner after already clearing out most of the dungeon, and was forced to simply restart the entire level, which is discouraging at the least. Besides that, there are cards you can use outside of the combat that are one-time use and at first seem like optional goodies to help you get through some tougher puzzles/dungeons. But instead, they are mandatory for solving certain puzzles which you won't know until it's too late.

This game is currently a bit too rough around the edges for me to recommend. But I hope the developer keeps trying as there are some good ideas here.

(I received a review code for free from the dev)

The dev sent me a free copy of this game!

The main conceit of this game is using different color lasers to hit all the targets. It gets interesting when you start combining lasers by beaming them into 2 ends of a T pipe and shifting their colors by sending them through crystals.

I made it to level 43 (out of 60) before finally hitting a roadblock that I just don't have the energy to overcome. This is a very challenging game, and unfortunately a large part of that is due to the game's mechanics, and not its inherent challenge.

Sometimes, very deep into this game, there are the aha! moments that puzzle fans live for, but before you can rejoice, you have to trudge through some pretty thick muck. The controls are extremely fidgety when placing down pipes, even though that's the only interactivity in this game beyond turning on/off lasers.

The levels are these gigantic open playing fields with a scattershot of targets and stars to collect, and even when you collect everything, you will often end up with pieces unused, making you question if you even did the puzzle in the intended way.

The UI also leaves something to be desired. I didn't notice until I was pretty far into the game that there was a "firing order" for lasers (so some colors have priority over others when they combine), labeled in a tiny sliver of the left side of the screen. That alone isn't great, but also it is still a bit of a mystery how the firing order functions as it's never properly explained and seems to work counterintuitively at times.

This is a very ambitious game, and kudos to the creator for watching my playthrough and listening to every bit of critique I said about this game. They've already made some small improvements within the month I played this game, so it's still in semi-development as of this review.

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.