Inner Tao

Difficulty : 4.5/5 (Extremely Hard) Global : 3.5/5 (Very Good) Curator page : [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44695991-Anokturnus/]Anokturnus[/url] Inner Tao is a minimalist puzzle game in which you control both a yin and a yang ball that need to help each other. An Inner Tao level consists of four elements: a yin and a yang ball you can control, yin and yang zones that make the floor of the level, orbs you can push, and marks on which the orbs need to be placed. Once every mark has an orb on it, the level is complete. The complexity of Inner Tao comes from the movement restrictions affecting every element of the puzzles. Yin can only move through yang and vice versa. The type of the orbs is determined by the zone they are in; if an orb is in a yin zone (meaning it's yang) and pushed in a yang zone, it switches from yang to yin. The controllable balls can never switch type. Thus, orbs are more than your typical sokoban dead weights, they need to be cleverly used to navigate through the puzzles. The balls can enter an orb of the opposite type, allowing you to use orbs as bridges. A ball coming into contact with an orb of the same type will push it, but you can also p…

Inner Tao is an extremely difficult but fair puzzle game. I am mostly familiar with Le Slo from their puzzle design in Lab Rat and I sort of expected a similarly chill level of difficulty. I couldn't have been more wrong. Inner Tao is one of the hardest Sokoban games I have played. You need to abandon your normal Sokoban methods here and build new strategies from the ground up. These puzzles are as beautiful as they are devious. There's a certain kind of inside out logic you need in order to crack these puzzles, and it's quite satisfying when you get the knack for it. Don't give up too early like I almost did. I became so stuck on level 14 that I uninstalled the game and swore it off. After a walk outside (the best puzzle solving strategy) I reinstalled it and made a bit more progress. After 21 hours I managed to solve all 36 puzzles. The hardest puzzle for me was level 29, which took several hours. It wasn't slipperiness that made level 29 tough, but rather my inability to appropriately apply Inner Tao's mandatory madcap inside out logic. As a testament to even that wicked puzzle's deductability, I solved it in my head while out on a walk. Inner Tao is a wonderful minimalist p…

Inner Tao may be a small game (only 36 levels), and these levels might all be small, but there is a lot of depth and difficulty in these levels. Sokoban games with multiple characters are rare, and this game takes that gimmick one step beyond, by keeping each character bound to a single color. The catch? The boxes can switch colors, leading to a ton of subtle interactions and surprising possibilities, that must be found to solve most of the puzzles within.

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Wonderfully twisty complications despite seeming so simple. Hard to wrap my head around just how different the navigational dynamics between the two pieces are from level to level.

i abandonded wisdom and practised eternity