Weaving Tides is full of a tangible love in its entire design. When I play this game, I can feel that its makers poured themselves into it. This in itself makes a game special and I was excited to spend time with these characters in their woven world. While I'm no expert on puzzle games, I have never played anything like Weaving Tides where you sew the world to solve puzzles. It's genuinely interesting and, for the most part, conceptually well executed.

Where the game falls short is in its controls. The carpet dragon doesn't always pass through the fiber quite where you expect and simple actions might take multiple tries (or not, if you can start to retain the ways its off but this doesn't seem consistent).

The puzzles are unapologetic and typically do not explain themselves. This is a good thing. More games should stop being afraid to "waste" a player's time and trust them to want to figure out how to solve a problem. I estimate I might have gotten half way through this game and quite a few of the puzzles were difficult for me by this point. When I managed to solve them, it felt really good. I never felt like the puzzle was obtuse or poorly designed.

My main struggle here was when I could see the solution to a puzzle but struggled against the controls to complete it. This was especially frustrating in puzzles with timed segments because the timing is pretty demanding. This is the main reason I ended up shelving this game for now. I found the trial and error to be fatiguing and I wasn't very motivated to get back into it.

I fell off this game more than I intentionally shelved it. I expect to go back at some point, there is a really lovely game here in Weaving Tides. None of its issues make it unplayable and for that I still want to recommend the game to others.

I nearly gave up on this game a half hour before the end due to a terribly designed combat encounter. This game is designed for aesthetic first and foremost, and it is wonderful. However, there isn't quite enough gameplay for an easy recommendation. It becomes clear after the 75% mark that the developers became insecure with what they had, with sudden introductions of artificial difficulty spikes unrelated to the core mechanic of weaving and knotting.

In my rating system, 2 stars is an average game, so this game gets a C-. It crashed more than once, and the story has way more text than it is interesting to read. Maybe worth getting on sale for children, as it does feature a free-weaving cooperative creative mode.