What do I say about a game that had one horrible element among fantastic ones?

I love what this game is. I love that you need pencil and paper and trial and error to solve its puzzles, I love how the puzzles chained into elaborate level-spanning hidden paths. 4/5 of the worlds were great, and I had such joy with every AHA! moment.

Something went horribly wrong in hexagon, the icy level world. The maze puzzle? Freaking hard, but good fun, loved it. Everything about the codes though, I don't understand. I still don't understand. I actually brute forced my way through every single puzzle involving the passwords in that area. I feel caveman level stupid but it just was not coming to me and I was desperate for progress and to see the game through. I still haven't looked up what the deal was with it. Was it obvious and I'm stupid? Was it convoluted and I'm justified? Idk man. It just felt bad.

Otherwise, incredible first person puzzler. The style was fresh, the wordlessness was calming, the elaborate secrets were enthralling.

Netflix games: a puddle of idle games and locked up older titles... that's what it was, until Poinpy walked into town.

GOD Poinpy is good fun. I played Downwell and knew the developer had the goods but literally making Upwell as a cute fruit collection mobile game with music from Calum Bowen was unexpectedly wonderful. The difficulty is just right, it allows plenty of room for assistance if needed, it has a proper endgoal and ending, and then there's even a puzzle mode and high score mode. It has everything, day 1.

My only issue with it was the sometimes frustrating hit detection. If you get a jump whose zenith overlaps with a platform, you're basically doomed to land on it before you can jump again. And so many times, I slammed into the ground 1 centimeter from an enemy instead of bouncing off of it, and I just felt like: come on, poinpy. Give me a break kid.

Lovely happy game. Play it to the end.

Very oddly... I kinda loved my time with this game, despite it being not very good. I think the base concept - freeform tower defense reliable on connected pipes - that I can get into.

But ah, 90% of the time nothing is attacking you, and when something is, it doesn't do damage, and it can be defeated in moments with a sentry.

And there are these ranges for each item, meaning you have to carefully plan where to build your pipelines around the obstacles on the stage and around YOUR OWN obstacles - that was unexpected, and clever, and fun - all of this sets up a great puzzley tower defense.

But you can't see the range of anything until you place it down, and at that point the range is what it is and you have to work around that, AH!

I actually think I liked the minimalism of starting with all 5 buildings available to build if you have the cash, but I wonder if with SOME way to upgrade your stuff, if it would've been a bit more fun.

Anyways, I ended up building a couple mines then spent about 10 minutes building ~84 labs to accumulate salt production faster and faster and capped the salt meter at literally the last second and was absolutely pumped and now I can't help but say: this was a lot of fun.

This one is pretty frickin stellar man. I've never seen a triangular grid used like the one in this game, and although it took some time to win me over with the mechanics of the game, by the end I was wishing for more. I still think there should have been a little better guiding at first, because at least for me, I was lost on how the mechanics worked for longer than I expected. When I went around to clean up some secrets I missed, I really got in the groove. Plus, hidden secrets in a little grid based game? Leading to lore? So cool.

Soundtrack is absolutely killlllller too

Hmm... I think I liked it! Very unusual sort of zach-like gameplay, where you have instructions, but they are semi-randomized, and you still get to choose how to use them and in what order each turn. That was hard enough to explain succinctly, figuring it out had my brain frying a bit!

This one has the richest story of the bundle (so far, haven't played WADTB and Triga), and also, surprisingly, multiple endings depending on how you choose to tend the gardens. The creators definitely had a lot to say and experiment with, and I could feel the love.

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.

This is the hardest puzzle game I have ever played.

Upon completion of all of the level sets, I'm still not sure if that is an overstatement or not! If not, it's the hardest puzzle game I have ever completed.

This game basically leaves no concept, no matter how devious, untouched. It gets so complex, you really have to rewire your brain just to handle it. In my most desperate moments, I tried writing down what was happening, but even that was difficult and in the end I felt like gaining skill with the mechanics was superior to a more methodical, slow approach.

Running into paradoxes was both frustrating and exciting, especially when you don't expect it. On the one hand, you're attempt at the level is dead. On the other, HERE'S ANOTHER TOTALLY DIFFERENT REALLY HARD LEVEL! I think overall I appreciated that an end wasn't completely an end, however...

Losing all your progress in a level can really suck. The set-ups get pretty intricate and if nothing else, re-setting them up becomes a chore. The last thing I want to do after reaching a sort of Game Over state is commit myself to a totally different puzzle.

Other gripe is that this game hardly makes any sort of attempt or even guiding hand towards its more intricate mechanics. It took me far too long to understand how exactly the enchanted items were functioning and how some paradoxes were occurring, and the most help I got was the ring man going "oh geez, looks like something strange is happening here. Oh dear oh my". I stopped using the ring about 10 levels in when I realized it was not really adding to my experience.

Still a great puzzle game. Love it. Just add a rewind feature and it's nearly perfect.

Yeah! It was lots of fun. While the game relies on gravity (sensible physics), it also starts allowing you to push things that you are standing on (not sensible physics, but really fun!). I actually got used to that and utilized it a bunch, so great choice! But later on, you can destroy parts of large crates and they just sorta maintain their original shape, but with the crates in-between missing? Like you can have 2 crates that aren't touching whatsoever and they are still quantum-linked or something so when you push one, it pushes the other. I didn't really like that as it created invisible walls and allowed some levels to be completed it what had to have been an unintended way. But, it's always a rare but satisfying thing to break a puzzle game in a clever way.

RIP all the crate dudes I sacrificed along the way to 100% o7