Entries tagged with genre: puzzle

Entry tags:

Game Impressions: Pixel Restorer, Epic Battle Fantasy 3

Pixel Restorer

Began: 5/5/2025
Completed: 5/25/2025
Playtime (24/24 free pictures): 11.4 hours
Free on Steam.
Visually, this game kinda looks like picross, but it’s not picross. You’re given a grid, where some squares have numbers in them, and the numbers indicate how many are in its (regular) shape; you then drag to form the shape, which helps you solve other shapes.
This game absolutely overstayed its welcome, and that’s because frankly it’s too easy. Even though the total end picture is huge, you’re never given more than a small segment to solve, so it never really challenged me mentally. It challenged me physically, though. Since I played on Steam Deck I tried using the joysticks and/or touchpad, but inevitably I found touchscreen worked best. Click-drag controls are really draining otherwise, and this is an issue unique to this game specifically, because regular picross isn't like that.
Giving the player bigger spaces to solve would’ve been better, but more importantly would’ve been the ability to create partial shapes. When I’m solving picross puzzles, part of my process is to mark down “guaranteed” fills. There are similarly guaranteed fills in this game too, but if a number says 7, you must fill 7 squares exactly, which means you can't just mark the guarantees, you have to guess at the full shape and location. Not being able to do partials fundamentally limited how difficult the game could ever get while remaining playable, I think.
Basically, I spent over 11 hours playing this game only to get the one achievement and most of that time felt like a battle against my own stamina and patience. I’m not playing any of the paid packs. I’m done and I’m free!!!

Epic Battle Fantasy 3

Began: 1/27/2025
Completed: 2/19/2025, but apparently didn’t post until now.
Playtime (normal difficulty, 51/60 medals): 9.4 hours
Free on Steam; I originally began on the Flash version via Flashpoint before learning it was on Steam for free (which is why I swapped).
I’ve had EBF 5 in my Steam library since before the v2 update but haven’t really played it. I thought I might as well, and then I thought I might as well go through EBF 3 and 4. Those games were a hallmark of my childhood - they’re a big part of why I love turn-based RPGs now.
EBF 3 embodies the best of the turn-based RPG genre. By the end, even on normal difficulty, it highly encourages strategic play - buffing your characters, keeping up regen, dispelling buffs on bosses, utilizing and adjusting to weaknesses and strengths whenever possible. The last two bosses operate best as stamina battles, playing things safe in order to ensure I stay alive and in good condition. I did wipe to the dragon one time though before really focusing my approach. And best of all, debuffs are actually useful. The last two bosses have poison absorb (to some degree; the dragon has only one head that regens to poison) and resist siphon, but earlier bosses, and boss adds, could all be poisoned - which meant that investing in those spells and building up poison stacks was a viable strategy. And I just appreciate games that give you status effect moves and let you abuse them. Stacking a full 10x poison on the desert boss and then surviving was a fun battle of attrition.
I also found it very helpful that you regen hp and mp just by walking around the overworld, and that, not only are all enemies shown on the screen, the ones blocking required paths don’t respawn while the optional ones do, allowing for easy backtracking. Plus, there’s no penalties or rng for running from battles. They’re just nice quality of life features.
In general, the game is just really impressive for a single dev and does come off as someone who understands RPGs and common game mechanics and made something based on what they wanted to see in a game. It got me to scrounge around on his Bluesky and it seems he’s working on a hidden objects game, and also technically hinted at the eventuality of EBF 6, which is neat. I’m happy to see that he’s still developing games.

Entry tags:

Game Impressions: Poptropica Adventures; GNOG; Strange Horticulture; SKYE

Oops. Oops. I started typing a set out a couple months ago and just never got around to finishing it. Also, I joined a static for the savage this FFXIV raid tier, which is eating up a chunk of my gaming time. Not that I mind, I really am enjoying the experience, but yeah, that kind of commitment is really affecting my already-tenuous will to play other games. 7.25 is releasing Occult Crescent and the Mamool Ja quests in a couple weeks and that’s also going to eat into even more time. Oops. Anyawy.

Poptropica Adventures

Began: 3/7/2025
Completed: 3/7/2025
Playtime (all museum exhibits): ~2 hours
Played through Retroarch for the achievement integration.
I mean, it’s a DS game of a kids game, the expectations are somewhat in the floor here. It’s really short. There’s only “four” islands, but in reality one is a hub so there’s only actually three of them. And those islands are also short. I have a better feel for the length and scale of Poptropica islands than when I was a kid, and I actually did replay bits of Poptropica semi-recently, but even then these islands are really short and mostly get their filler from the handful of minigames. Every island also has a museum exhibit, and you get 100% completion there by completing every sidequest.
The minigames weren’t that good, either. The most tolerable one was the “racing” minigame, where you basically just jump and duck to dodge obstacles. There’s also a climbing minigame where you also have to dodge obstacles from the top, and a pipe maze minigame, and those were unremarkably fine. My absolute least favorite one was the one where the NPC throws out objects and you have to either dodge or intercept them to win, and you can only miss so many times before you lose. The movement was so incredibly floaty that I hated every moment of it. Then there’s the maze, where you use the touchscreen to drag your boat/ship/whatever to the edge and avoid both obstacles and the walls. That one wasn’t bad… except that Astro Knights Island had you complete the minigame every single time you went between Earth(?) and the planet hub, and vice versa. And you were required to do that multiple times. I think I had to play it 8-10 times? Really not fun. And then if you’re trying to go for the 100% RetroAchievements set you have to beat the high score for 5 minigame arcades in the postgame, and I gave up because I do not want to do the dodging minigame ever again.
Overall… I don’t recommend it. Maybe if you’re under the age of 8 and are a kid in the late 00’s and are at the end of the licensed GBA/DS shovelware era, it’s a neat little distraction, but that’s kind of a small niche now.

GNOG

Began: 3/22/2025
Completed: 3/22/2025
Playtime (100% achievements): 1.7 hours
Bought via the Humble COVID-19 bundle in 2020.
A little game about solving little boxes. The puzzles themselves are fairly simple and straightforward, with only a couple things that were a bit confusing. I mistakenly thought this was a platformer for the longest time, until I was going through my list of owned games and marking what genre they were and learned this was a puzzle game.
Honestly, I feel like I didn’t play this the way it was intended. It calls itself a “tactile” game, but I played it with a mouse which inherently doesn’t provide tactile responses, and I imagine a proper controller could have used vibration or that thing on the DualSense controller where triggers have some resistance to being pressed. I also noticed there was VR compatibility, which probably would’ve gone further for making the game more appealing visually.
Even aside from that, though, I thought it was lacking. I got the impression that this is more of a toy than a game, something more about showing off the capabilities of a technology than a game strong on its own merits. It’s like the tech demo aspects of Astro’s Playroom. …Except that I didn’t engage at all with the technology. Also, I didn’t vibe with the aesthetic style, which is fine, but it also felt… childish? Like it’s focused on providing mental stimulation but not providing depth. Which is approximately the opposite of what I want from a puzzle game, but then maybe this wasn’t intended to be a puzzle game.

SKYE

Began: 5/1/2025 (technically 6/22/2020)
Completed: 5/2/2025
Playtime (11/17 achievements): 2.3 hours
Free on Steam.
A chill flight exploration game. I originally played this in 2020 and stopped after a few minutes because the performance was really bad on the laptop I had then.
The story is pretty much just an excuse to have a couple objective-based flights. The game is really all about flying around. And it is some nice flying! It’s still nothing compared to the likes of Wii Sports Resort, which has a lot of visual variety - the island here consists of grass plains, a few villages, and a couple landmarks - but it is still pretty good. The painting-like artstyle is nice, though it means the graphics needed to be set to the max to look good. I’m not good enough at making sharp turns for the two races, but flying on a more casual basis was fun and pretty relaxing.
Though… I’m missing 1 each of the telescopes and the targets, even though I’ve spent a good half hour just flying around trying to find the last ones. I really just don’t know where they are.
Overall, pretty neat. Doesn't completely fill the void shaped like Wii Sports Resort Island Flyover, but at least does something.

Strange Horticulture

Began: 4/15/2025
Completed: 5/11/2025
Playtime (100% achievements): 7.1 hours
Bought during the Spring 2024 Steam sale.
A puzzle game about identifying plants based on customer demands and plant descriptions, and unraveling a story surrounding Undermere and the appearance of a woman in a jade mask and a monstrous creature that embodies death.
Ultimately it’s a rather short and not that difficult game, but I really enjoyed it. The whole concept of closely evaluating plants to try and match them to their descriptions was a lot of fun. Same goes with the day hints pointing towards specific map locations that unlock plants essential for pursuing different endings. There are 8 endings in four pairs of two, which are unlocked by making a specific decision on the second to last day. Two sets are simply variants of a certain action on the last day, one relies on a longer-term decision, and one is the default. I believe you can unlock every ending path in a single playthrough but I didn’t do that the first time around.
Something I noticed narratively was how immensely limited your perspective is. Sure, there are the day tarots and the accompanying narrative there, but that’s it in terms of “external” perspective. You are limited to the knowledge you glean from others’ gossip and the things they want from you. Because of that, you’re less getting a comprehensive understanding of the world around you and more responding to events as they happen. It’s an interesting approach, but I think the worldbuilding suffers a bit as a result - it wants to evoke the feeling that I’m really “there,” but I still don’t have a great grasp on the world or the motivations of other characters, especially Thea, because I don’t have the lifetime of knowledge that someone truly living in it would. Hopefully the upcoming sequel will at least provide more insights into the setting.
Also, when I think of this game I recall that “woke games” list and how this game is apparently bad because a character’s mother took her daughter and fled from her abusive father. Like, wow. That’s all I need to know about those kinds of people and their ideology.

I’m still slowly playing through a different puzzle game, I swear. I promise the fact that I haven’t played it since mid-March doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned it.

Entry tags:

Game Impressions: Venba; Doors - Paradox

Something I want to do this year is 1) play more games instead of just the one MMO, and 2) write up my thoughts on them. Not necessarily reviews, but more my impressions. Partially because writing this down will help me remember these games, but mostly because I also want to write more this year and this helps me pad out my word count lol.

Venba

Began: 1/1/2025
Completed: 1/1/2025
Playtime (to base completion): 1.5 hours
Purchased on Steam via Humble Choice December 2024
A short narrative game about a immigrant family from India who settled in Canada. The general advertising and the demo focused more on the cooking, but the main focus is really the story. Across the 7 chapters, five I’d call “true” cooking puzzles, one is really a plating sequence, and one chapter doesn’t have cooking at all. I do appreciate that they added recipes and music tracks in a later patch - both because yeah, that food looks tasty, and because the content you get felt a bit sparse otherwise. I wish we actually cooked the plating sequence, since that was half a dozen dishes and we did none of the prep work.
In terms of story, I particularly enjoyed Kavin/Kevin’s perspective. The whole “rejection -> guilt -> reexploration” narrative is just something that feels really personal. This kind of cultural struggle, alienation, and rejection tends to get overlooked when portraying experiences of diaspora, and the game even alludes to that, with Kavin’s coworker wanting fully positive and accepted cultural diversity in the scene they were working on. And I mean, it’s really nice that there’s even enough people to provide those sorts of positive representations, and enough conscientiousness for that to be desired at all. And if I had to choose one kind of representation, of course I’d choose the positive version. But this sort of complicated, messy relationship with identity, and having to grapple with that in a society that has become more accepting than how I was as a child, resonated a lot with me.
Also, the way the game handled Tamil in both perspectives was also really neat! With Venba’s perspective, you had different colored text when they spoke in Tamil vs. English, and there were also “splotched” text boxes from Kavin when he used more complicated English words. And with Kavin’s perspective, I really, really appreciated how the cookbook appears in Tamil and Kavin has to translate it line by line and makes mistakes along the way. I liked that we revisited Venba’s restored cookbook at all. It was just a really sweet moment to see her work, and for Kavin to continue it too.
The ability to scroll through the text messages in a couple sequences was also something I appreciate from a game design perspective. This kind of flavor texts with ambient narratives is something unique to video games and other interactive mediums, and would’ve been omitted or heavily truncated in other mediums simply because it would take up precious space.
Overall, I enjoyed it! I wish there were more gameplay aspects, but the story (and art, and music) were great. Probably not going for 100% achievements, since getting the remaining achievements involves going through the chapters again and there’s no way to skip directly to the food portion.

Doors - Paradox

Began: 1/7/2025
Completed: 1/9/2025
Playtime (100%): 5.7 hours
Received for free via Epic Games Store
An escape room puzzle game. The game consists of three chapters, with about 40 levels total. Each level has two gems (blue and red) plus a story note, and if you collect all the gems of each particular color in a chapter you unlock an extra level.
I did not particularly love the puzzles. They range from incredibly easy to frustratingly glitchy to things that weren’t even intended to be puzzles but are just obtuse because of the way the game works. Thankfully, there is a free “skip puzzle” button, and admittedly I did use it a couple times. A couple puzzles that I otherwise knew how to solve were too glitchy to complete; one of them straight up did not respond. I almost used the button for a physics-based puzzle but then the physics glitched out and let me solve it. I don’t know how you’re intended to solve that one.
Frankly, a lot of the difficulty just came from how the game functions at a base, non-puzzle level. There’s a lot of spinning things and trying to figure out what camera angle you need to be in and where you need to drag an item for the game to accept it. And sometimes this becomes a puzzle on its own. For instance, in Chapter 1 Door 8, the “solution” to the three valves “puzzle” was actually “just keep turning it until you completely move the rods.” The rods moved so little that I was trying to find a particular configuration the valves were supposed to be in. Oops.
There were a couple interesting bits, though. The one puzzle that had you fitting in pieces with colored circles on them to match an image was different (and reminded me of another puzzle game). The puzzles that have you panning around an image to find clues were neat. The targeting mechanics for the extra levels in Chapter 2 was neat. And I generally just really liked any level that utilized the background in any way (this was mostly Chapter 3). And the art design itself was pretty interesting.
The story is present, I guess. It takes the form of notes you find in each level, and each note is only a sentence long statement from a cat guide. The first chapter was basically telling the life story of a character but I did not vibe with the severity of the tone. The tone of the second was also too severe. Chapter 3 was fine though for being far sparser and more conceptual. Honestly, the devs could’ve just omitted the story and imo it would have improved the experience, especially when they advertise it as a “relaxing” game.
Overall… fine. I was generous and gave it a 6/10, but I could’ve gone lower (and maybe should have). It does not make me willing to play the sequel. In fact, the whole reason why I played this game now was because the sequel is in the January Humble Choice and I wanted to see if it would justify continuing my subscription (the only other game I was interested in there was Against the Storm, and a friend was willing to gift that one to me). I canceled my sub.

I have my eyes on a number of different games I want to play next. For the time being I’m more interested in knocking out some shorter games to establish a bit more consistency in my game time, but this means more narrative and puzzle games. This is an excuse to play that Nekopara catboy game.