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Clever games curator review: 8/10 A really fun turn-based puzzler that just so happens to look like an RPG dungeon crawl. At first your challenge is to avoid dying from the numerous enemies that are around you, but quickly you collect weapons and skills that allow you to dispose of them easily, leaving you with the real goal: collecting coins and eventually climbing to the top of the structure at the center of the world.

Since everything is turn based the enemies are really just obstacles to free movement and defeating them involves cleverly avoiding their attacks and/or attacking when they can’t. This gets more complex when there are multiple enemies, and then much easier once you’ve found the proper skills and weapons. Thereafter your remaining challenge is navigating the hand-designed maze-like environments and figuring out how to jump from one platform to another.

Note that even jumping is turn-based; when you jump you move up one unit into the air and then hover there until you take your next action. So even in this way everything happens on a grid.

Meanwhile the mazes are quite challenging, particularly because there’s only a few different textures used in the entire game so you have to entirely rely on the spatial layout, AND they often involve three dimensional movement, dropping down and climbing up. Also, since everything is laid out on a 90 degree grid there are lots of regions of self similarity that aid in the confusion. Whether or not you think this is a design flaw or a fun challenge really depends on your tastes. I could have used a little more visual variety.

Meanwhile the puzzles are top notch. As soon as an idea becomes well trodden a new elaboration is introduced, or the entire idea gets flipped on its head. I won’t go into the details to avoid spoilers, but this was a game that I felt compelled to play in a couple sittings because of how it kept on evolving new and interesting challenges. Only a few times did I feel like any of the puzzles were unfair or deeply misleading. And to the dev’s credit after I reported my issues it sounds like those are going to be tweaked for better experience for future players. If those rough spots are smoothed out I would say the difficulty is one significant step above casual. IE nothing’s ever overly obvious, but you won’t be stuck for more than a minute before you have the “aha” necessary to proceed and never did I feel like my brain was hurting.

My only real complaints: the music starts out pleasant but then you realize you’ve listened to the same 3 minute tune for four hours straight and you really wish for some variety. Though graphically very simple the game really taxes my mid tier laptop making it run quite warm. Probably this is because there are quite a few lights and that’s hard to optimize, however given the basically zero FPS nature of the game I think it could be significantly improved. And from a game design perspective: (1) it was never entirely clear where I would restore to if I quit and came back later, leading me to perhaps binge the last portion of the game a bit more than I should have. (2) coins were a fun challenge but ultimately empty with no reward for collecting them or even a way to tell what percent were collected.