Overall I think this is a super refreshing take on Panel de Pon gameplay with great art, music, presentation, and overall vibes. The story mode feels like it's about 80% visual novel segments, and 20% puzzle gameplay. Recommend if you like puzzle/match-3 games at any level, or if you enjoy cute queer vibes.

The world is colorful and is infused with culture, which feels appreciated since there's not a lot of games out there that have this vibe. The character designs are also great, with Mo and Pookie standing out to me in particular. The writing is great, and the characters feel like they have an actual history behind them outside of the main plot of the story. There were a couple of typos and misspellings, but it's nothing that can't be fixed with a quick patch.

The spell mechanics and the changes to how garbage is cleared are both refreshing and make the "puzzle game" parts easier to get into. Spells can set up really cool stuff and add new kinds of patterns to look out for which are a welcome addition to a classic type of puzzle game. Freezing as a mechanic is interesting, but it can be hard to visually identify what type of block is frozen so it's hard to clear and unfreeze; not sure if the visual noise is also intended as part of the mechanic but it makes counterplay harder as a result.

If you're used to classic Panel de Pon, you might find the controls a bit "squidgy", especially when trying to skill chain by moving blocks underneath falling blocks. Also while clearing garbage, it seems like it's not possible to move blocks into the space where the initial clear was made to set up garbage chains, which is harder to deal with.

The "panic" animation that the blocks do is also a bit too intense for me, and makes it a bit harder to see what's going on at crucial moments as your stack rockets up to the top of the screen.

Overall, I really enjoyed the art style, music, writing, presentation, and the game design - basically all of the game! With a bit more polish I think this could be even better, but I'd still recommend playing it now anyway. Looking forward to seeing what this studio does next!