English Country Tune

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…

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.

English Country Tune, developed and published by increpare games, is an abstract puzzle game that stands apart through its willingness to challenge not just the player’s logic, but their assumptions about how puzzles themselves should work. At first glance, it resembles a traditional block-pushing game, but that familiarity quickly dissolves as it begins to introduce ideas that reshape the player’s understanding of space, movement, and interaction. It is a game that constantly asks the player to adapt, often requiring a complete shift in perspective from one set of puzzles to the next. The early stages ease players in with relatively straightforward mechanics, encouraging them to move objects across grids and reach designated goals. However, this foundation is only temporary. As the game progresses, it introduces a wide range of systems that alter how objects behave, how movement is interpreted, and even how space itself functions. What begins as a simple exercise in positioning evolves into something far more complex, where the rules are not always immediately clear and must be discovered through experimentation. This constant reinvention keeps the experience fresh, but it also d…

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