Aloof

Interesting puzzle game with a campaign coop mode. The difficulty curve is not exactly smooth, with a few puzzles in the campaign requiring wildly out-of-the-box thinking while the rest is pretty standard.

Worst music in any game I have ever played. I hope you enjoy listening to a piano play a melodic 5th over and over and over and over and over. What were they thinking?

not worth 79 pence.

I didn't even get to a battle portion because I found the game fatuous, and dull. To it's credit it has a demo, but I returned it having only paid 50 cents. I really wanted to stick it out to see all that the game could have to offer because it seems to have some neat ideas, but it was just so bad to start with, there was no getting past it. By all means try the demo and see if it's for you, but I really can't recommend this game.

Very fun little puzzle game that can post a surprising challenge in the later levels, depending on the difficulty you choose. I played the campaign with a friend and we had turned the difficulty up at first because we thought the game would be easy, but then had to turn it back down after getting humbled later on. At first glance I thought that the game was basically "Tetris where you can freely move falling pieces", which seemed like it would be way too simple to beat, but there's a surprising variety of win conditions. I especially loved the "puzzle" levels. Rather than giving you a tutorial pop-up to teach you about some advanced mechanic, the game would give you a puzzle where the only possible solution would be for you to figure the mechanic out on your own. We always felt like geniuses when we'd finally figure out what the game was trying to coax us into learning, which is how a good puzzle game should make you feel. The co-op is also well integrated into the gameplay--it's not like you're just quietly playing side-by-side for 2x the points. You want to talk to your partner so that you're building different shapes, or healing effectively, or sending combos at the same time, …

Aloof does have a similar gameplay to Puyo Puyo, but the goal differs. The game will ask you -more often than not- to draw a pattern, almost like a picross game. The catch being, if you match too many tiles, they will disappear and ruin your shapes. Some levels can be brute-forced but the rest is pretty chill. It gets cheap when it goes on sale, and while being on the short side of things, is trying something different, so I would recommend if the genre is something that you enjoy.