English Country Tune

Increpare's sense for puzzle design really jives with me, but it's his aesthetic sensibilities that take his games somewhere really special. The presentation here is touchingly somber. It feels at once primordial and futuristic.

It's alright. I kind of wish it could stand on its own two feet compared to Sausage Roll. Being in full 3D (with no gravity, too!) made it much harder to picture the levels in my head and solve them logically. The levels are also quite specific in what they want from you. Put another way, there aren't really a lot of ways to get them wrong, just many, many strategies which do nothing and one which totally solves everything. There are exceptions and fun puzzles but that was kind of the impression I got. My favourite worlds were probably the Larvae and the Whale ones, which are the first two. It loses a little steam as it goes but it was still pretty good, and it's cheap. I feel it was worth the money.

TL;DR: 6.5/10 This can't hold a candle to Stephen's Sausage Roll, but then again, what can? Thankfully, it still delivers designer increpare's bread & butter: mind-bending core mechanics and inspired level design, respectively. The game gradually introduces a half-dozen new ideas onto a 3d Sakoban foundation, but the first is doing the, *giggle*, heavy lifting. That mechanic, called Larva, asks solvers to recontextualize 3d space relative to gravity and was obviously the worthy inspirational seed. Many later mechanics feel disjointed, as if conceived for separate freeware releases, but instead, tacked on here. Which isn't a real issue but for the piecemeal nature of the whole experience. More than half of the 17 worlds use only one or two mechanics, and it's not until the very end that those pieces are amply integrated. Each new mechanic is a genuinely fascinating spatial idea, but kept separate, the game plays more like a puzzle anthology than an escalating journey. The automatic camera is a meandering drunk man, but in all fairness, it would need telepathy to predict the ideal view for a player's intentions. Many of the trickiest levels came early. By the time mech…

It's definitely for more experienced and/or motivated puzzlers, It is a masterpiece though. A few comments. There are some puzzles early in the game in Larva and/or Whale only stages that are very challenging and have exceptional craftsmanship and creativity. But then in the late game the difficult generally drop to what should have been the early to mid game difficulties. So it is kind of odd to go through a big struggle with the first handful of stages only to find the difficult dropping and rarely climbing back to anything close to those first stages. I feel like that's partly why this game gets such an interesting reputation, for better or worse. Some of the levels in the first few stages are real humdingers and you basically just started playing and it makes quite an impression. And last couple of things is related to those same early Larva and/or whale stages. The gravity mechanic is a bit unclear/confusing and a better explanation would have went a long way imo. Especially because you can swing your square through a 270 degree arc before landing but push a larva or whale in the 90 to 180 portion of the swing and the gravity imbued is given by the orientation of the squ…

Very tricky and mind-bending puzzle game with great visual design

A wonderful, relaxing collection of puzzles. I'm really surprised this never took off given the popularity of the developer's next game, Stephen's Sausage Roll. The puzzling is a bit simpler here than in SSR, but it's no less satisfying. I've had it for over a decade and replayed it twice now. The length and depth of the game far exceeds its asking price. If you're a puzzle fan, there's little reason not to check this out.