Knot

I do love Burr and Block puzzles, and, if this game existed in a vacuum, I'd be able to recommend it. Unfortunately, there is a similar mobile game called Interlocked, so I have a good idea of how much better this game could be. Knot has an awful UI. It supports keyboard-mouse, which rotates the objects extremely slowly and makes it tedious to complete the puzzles. It also supports controller, which utilizes a cursor that zips around the screen at blinding speed and can't select pieces with any precision. Neither of these would be problems if the speed could be edited in the options menu, but it cannot. The experience of playing Knot gets underscored by all sorts of minor annoyances. A piece is removed from play once it exits a bounding box, but the bounding box is small enough that some pieces can be removed while they're still entangled in others. One of the few choices offered by the options menu is muting the music, which unmutes every time the game is re-opened. There is no control for zooming out, no control for stopping a moving piece, no control for re-centering the puzzle. There's a key/button that's supposed to slow down rotation speed, but it never works in my experie…

Great concept (yet no novelty here), beautiful, but the controls are terrible and make this a pain to play. you have to click and drag across the whole screen to rotate about 5 degrees (maybe less, it's ridiculous) Also, puzzles are unispired. Since moving the camera is a pain to try to figure out the puzzle, you just click and drag around until you solve it. Last but not least, pieces keepmoving after you release the key to move them, making this a complete pain.

Soothing music, challenging puzzles. The ability to pause puzzles is useful. The puzzle difficulty didn't increase linearly; some later puzzles were easier than earlier puzzles. Manipulating the puzzle pieces was a little annoying because the keyboard controls motion in only two dimensions; figures have to be rotated with the mouse, and LOTS of scrolling rotates the figures only a little, so turning a puzzle 180 degrees requires you to scroll again and again and again. All the pieces of a given puzzle are covered in the same pattern (various kinds of wood grain or marble), so actually seeing where one piece ends and another begins becomes difficult as the puzzles become more complex (more pieces and more interlocking). So the game would be easier on the eyes if the devs used different patterns for different pieces.

Advertised controls don't work for me and are not adjustable (there's 1 option on offer: Mute everything. Which is in fact essential considering the thing that passes for music.) I used a gamepad stick to rotate, arrow keys to shift the pieces, plus mouse clicks for piece selection and to interrupt shifting. As clunky as that sounds and is, I got used to it right away and was able to play without much trouble, finicky positioning included. That's clearly not disability friendly though, beware. I shall also point out that most textures are patently ugly, despite being described as gorgeous on the store page. Warlock Arts suffer from questionable tastes. Which won't be held against them. In fact. the game earns the thumb up, because its puzzles are entertaining. It's what really matters (along with being playable.) Puzzles are subjectively rather easy, not excessively so. My guess is that they were much harder to design than to solve (if designed manually, that is,) and the authors did a fine job there. Rudimentary software still delivers enjoyable head-scratchers.

Good games ruined by the horrible mouse movement

A nice puzzle game, but the controls severely mar the experience. Parts only move on x- and y-axis in relation to the screen. So you turn around the whole piece over and over, slowly. Accidentally selecting some other piece while doing it and losing track of what you were going to do. Tiles slide without you wanting them to, you cannot stop them precisely when required and you often find them stuck without knowing where. There is no look-through or zoom option. Every part having the same look makes for a nice coherent puzzle look, but it also makes it incredible hard to distinguish between the individual parts and understand how they are interlocked, making it hard to come up with a "plan of attack". In the later stages I often found myself just wiggling everything and often times quite stumped at how I managed to omit a tile from the picture.