Decent, tightly made puzzle game with some great aesthetics; art and sound design are minimalist but top notch, and definitely earn the game its title!

In terms of puzzles, Ethereal very much takes a small set of rules and explores them to the fullest without getting bogged down in needless complexity, and its a solid core to base a game on. I particularly like how nothing is ever directly explained to the player (the only words in the game are in the menus), and yet the teaching of the mechanics feels smooth and organic throughout.

However the limited ruleset can make some of the puzzles feel a bit samey after a while (there's only so much you can do with such a simple premise after all). Also, Ethereal commits what I'm increasingly thinking might be a cardinal sin for this kind of puzzle game; strict linearity. This is very much the kind of game where I could spend 15 minutes on a puzzle getting nowhere only to come back later and spot the solution immediately, and it would have been great to be able to go try a different puzzle whenever I got stuck.

The minor issues aren't dealbreakers though at the end of the day though; the game isn't too long or too hard at the end of the day, and I feel I can recommend it both on a gameplay front and especially on an aesthetic one.