Very brave of them to make a puzzle where you can’t actually tell what certain mechanics do or the difference between certain objects, things that are vital to any puzzle game. Is that bomb actually bigger than the other one, it sure isn’t obvious whether it is or not. And even if you figure out it is bigger, what’s the actual blast radius of that bomb? I sure can’t fucking tell because this perspective is absolutely not ideal for this kind of game. It’s not a bad concept for a puzzle game but Bombuzal doesn’t want to bother meeting the basic standards of puzzle games. At least the song that plays during puzzles is weird and fun in a way I like, easily the highlight of the game.

So after an embarrassing launch of July NSO games, it became easy to take solace in the fact that these games could have been good, as no one had ever heard of them. Bombuzal is not one of those games. It’s a puzzle game where you blow up bombs and try to avoid explosions of what you’ve blown up. Bigger bombs make bigger explosions, and are therefore harder to avoid. Some of the concepts are initially neat until you realize the game fails to expand on them, resulting in one of the most dry puzzle game experiences. To add difficulty, some of the mechanics, like teleporters and the ice specifically, are designed simply to create error in the player. After the second map of it being impossible to know the solution to the puzzle without first dying, I went ahead and stopped. Most levels are fine, and it has some cool ideas for itself, but I figure if the troll mechanics were how it was expanding it’s difficulty this early on, I would probably not see anything worthwhile in the 100+ levels it appears to hold. 2/6