Wise Garden

This game looks gorgeous, the art, atmosphere and soundtrack are impressively good. There are some original ideas as well in terms of puzzle design. For example, boss levels at the end of each section require you to solve the same puzzle in multiple panels that are impacting one another (akin to some multi-panel puzzles in Witness and Taiji, but with a different take) However, I can't really recommend this game to thinky puzzle game fans, primarily because of how the core puzzle mechanic works and how the puzzle interface doesn't provide the means to think deeply about the levels. The gist of this puzzle mechanic is: you're given a grid of 5x5/6x6/7x7 and you need to draw a path from the entrance to the exit satisfying certain conditions like a specific number of turns, etc. However, you also need to place different types of stones on the grid first, and this is where the puzzles' search space explodes exponentially. Earlier levels where there are only a few stones you can place in each level are actually quite fun. But when it asks you to place 8 different stones on a 7x7 grid before you can even start drawing the path makes it really hard to reason about the puzzles. Each s…

I am now wise.

interesting mechanics and theme, but I found the gameplay to be a little stiff, it's sometimes hard to visualise what you want to do, and hard to iterate on your solutions without restarting.

8/10

Needs more work in term of interface. Placing rocks isn't intuitive when you need to delete all your progress in case you make a mistake. No way to restart a level but exiting it, and it becomes repetitive.

Just finished it, great puzzle game, kept me engaged from start to finish.