Gear：治愈齿轮

[i](This game was received for curation with no promise of a review, positive or otherwise.)[/i] The premise of Gear is clear enough: Click on gears in the correct order to set them into motion, with the goal of moving all walls into place. The music is ethereal and unobtrusive, the design is solid, the graphics are minimalist and clean, the interface is simple. In short: Gear seems like everything you want in a puzzle game. It feels similar in style to Maciej Targoni's excellent "Hook," although whereas that one might have been a bit too easy, Gear most definitely is not. It's difficult to criticize a game when it is this carefully crafted. That said, you should know going in that puzzles get complex very, very quickly. The game will not offer you hints, it will not hold your hand, and it will not tolerate a wrong move: Click the wrong gear at the wrong time and you will need to start the level over. Deal with it. For players who are good at spatial puzzles and who have the ability to plan several moves ahead, Gear will absolutely offer you a solid challenge. For those casual gamers who think "eh, I'm pretty good"...well, it's about the price of a Caffe Latte Tall and if Gear …

For a dollar I did expect a barebones game like no main menu or level select or audio options, and I like the cheap minimalist puzzle games, but Gear relies way too much on timing rather than puzzle solving. I thought this would just be a Hook knockoff since the description says minimalist puzzle game but level 13 and some of the later levels were so heavily reliant on timing that I had to set up a macro to adjust the intervals since I was so tired of all the trial and error. This game would have been exactly what I wanted if there was just a little wiggle room on those tight levels and not the bars' hitboxes extending past their visual indicators when they could have just very satisfyingly slid past each other.

Levels quickly become difficult, hard to parse, and timing-based in an irritatingly finicky way. It's a puzzle game where you might not be able to complete a level even after watching a level walkthrough. That's dumb design.

Gear is a perfectly fine, little game that really is more of a neutral recommendation more than a big thumbs up, but factoring the price into things I see no problem suggesting it to someone that likes puzzle games (with a bit of reaction/timing based gameplay mixed in). Premise is simple with the only action being that you click on specific gears to start them rotating to get rods to move through to their destinations without colliding. Of the 60 levels I'd say around only 20 really required timing specific presses while the rest was more just about order of operations. It follows the fairly typical formula that levels go easier to harder and then introduce a new mechanic and restart easy to hard, and repeat. But that said the last ten levels feel like they're meant to somewhat be a culmination of everything but due to their "gimmick" I thought it was more of a frustrating way to end things, but ultimately I still enjoyed sorting out the solution to each of the levels. There are quite a few puzzle games with different mechanics but are in the same market of very cheap, single-screen spatial awareness puzzles. This wouldn't be my top pick, but it's also not bad. Pick it up if you…

First of all game has no main menu. It launches player to the last level he was in. For second, game doesn't have any level selector. That means we cannot turn back to particular level. There is only an option to go back 1 level without options to turn back (we have to do levels we turned back again). Compared to other logic game this has a nice mechanics. It's simple but require a lot of focus and prediction. The possibility of passing a level depends on precise timing and patience (and often counts luck in it). Game's also missing a one turn back option, which requires repeating level from the start after failing. Game's hard and good but lack of menus and options makes it harder to navigate in.

Great small but neat game!