Can of Wormholes

really quite shocked at how well received this hint system is? the mini puzzles are designed to be incredibly simple, so you dont just get lost like in the main puzzle. it lays out very very simply the core mechanic of the puzzle. but, in this game, the core mechanics ARE the puzzles, because every puzzle in the game is designed around figuring out a very tight and smart concept. i found myself using hints, immediately understanding what the game was showing me, and then immediately being able to solve the puzzle, completely cheating me of doing it myself. youre given a smaller version of the puzzle where you can only do ONE thing so its painfully obvious. i think these mechanics couldve been introduced much slower and clearer. theyre brilliant and incredibly clever, but i think the game suffers from the complexity of each one and how constant theyre thrown at you. a developer in a reddit thread said 'some other players will have put the pieces together on their own, and I believe that diluting their experience with the extra puzzle will be unsatisfying for the player', as a reason why they didnt introduce simple puzzles slower. i couldnt actually disagree with this more. i dont…

I just 100%'d Can of Wormholes. The density of secret discoveries in this game is extremely high. Higher than basically all the other puzzle games I've played. That alone warrants a recommendation. I believe this game's difficulty caters well to players not engrossed in the puzzle genre as well. Things I didn't like as much: Sound effects. I don't like 'em. Some of the puzzles are glorified counting puzzles or an exercise in mirroring an image across an axis. And most importantly, the delay before continual movement (like DAS in Tetris) is extremely awkward. It often results in me being unable to accurately position my worm. Sometimes I get annoyed and just tap the WASD keys repeatedly instead of holding it down. A smoother movement system can be found in games such as A Monster's Expedition, or Baba Is You.

this is very good puzzle game

I like esoteric puzzles. In a sense, these are puzzles that don't [i]tell[/i] you they're puzzles, but you learn of their solvable nature later on in the game - essentially a metroidvania for knowledge-based design - the most famous example being The Sun early on in The Witness. I think Can of Wormholes, nestled hidden in marketing amidst the many satisfying gameplay mechanics already present, has one of the best esoteric design progressions of any puzzle game I've played - better than The Witness. I won't spoil too much, but the game will have an ending before you've interacted with everything on the ships. Booting it up again after said credits and even learning how to interact with these seemingly-needless objects is a journey in itself, with a more satisfying end than I could've asked for. What a phenomenal way to implement secrets into your game. That's what makes me still smile when I think of Can of Wormholes on occasion, years after having played it - but I would recommend it for that initial ending on its own, the puzzles in this game somehow mesh being difficult, fair, and approachable all at once. It's a puzzle game I would recommend to genre veterans and gran…

Great from start to end.

A great twist on sokoban where you must keep your own worm's size and movement rules in mind as you maneuver yourself and other pushable objects with their own unique shapes into place. The game's relatively small list of unique objects have a surprising amount of interactions that the game teaches over its course, eventually allowing for some unique twists on old puzzles. I generally found solving the puzzles satisfying, and I felt like even lategame puzzles were usually more about finding a key insight rather than simply scaling up the complexity. The hint systems are good. The main one usually opens a simplified version of a puzzle that forces the player to make a key move that will be useful in the real puzzle. With its assistance, I never found myself reaching for a guide. Overall, I can understand why this won Game of the Year in the 2024 Thinky Awards.