Room to Grow

Recommending this one but with caveats. This is closer to a 'neutral' review than a positive one. On the one hand, this game is original, well presented, and fairly easy to understand. On the other hand, the game gets very hard, very fast. Casual puzzle gamers will tap out after 45 minutes. More medium-level puzzle gamers (which is about where I fall) may get closer to 3 hours in. Dedicated/hardcore Sokoban fans may find a lot to like here. Everyone else... maybe think twice before buying. For reference, I have completed (and thoroughly enjoyed) games like Isles of Sea & Sky and Patrick's Parabox. Those games have wild challenges in them but it feels like you learn over time, feel a sense of progress and cumulative understanding, and can break down many of the harder puzzles in the game, even if the toughest optional ones elude you. Room to Grow is cute & clever at first but soon feels opaque and impenetrable. Rather than just being 'hard,' I think room to grow stumbles because it doesn't feel like you learn very much as you go. Some puzzles feel big and unwieldy and like they lean too much on trial and error. And sometimes, you look at the playfield and it seems like the g…

Great puzzle game!

Difficulty: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ Quality: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ A very cute game that fully explores an idea I haven't really seen elsewhere. For the most part excellent puzzle design, and I appreciate that they stopped at just [spoiler]3[/spoiler] worlds rather than trying to force uninteresting or contrived ideas into the game. I only have one complaint, but it's a pretty major one: for a significant number of puzzles, there's a giant state space, and I found just finagling to be a more reliable strategy than trying to either come up with ideas for what to do or logically eliminate things. I've played a few other puzzle games that fall into this trap - thankfully in this case it only happens in quite a small minority of puzzles (mostly optional ones that attempt to be hard), and beating the game was still well worth my time, just probably not 100% (which I didn't do).

A prickly little puzzler with Sokoban-esque roots, an interesting evolution of mechanics, and a tough-but-fair learning curve. Disregard humanity. Embrace cactus. Ow. Ow. Ow. Embracing the cactus was a bad idea. Ow.

top ten deck games

Wonderful puzzle game