Policy
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It's not without merit, I'm all for geek games and if you're interested in geometry its worth a shot, but only if you have a video walk through handy. But it's incredibly frustrating and not really worth the effort as an edutainment game, as it suffers from some fairly ease of access related issues. I will now try to 'prove' why.
Well, it's literally just a geometry tool, I got tricked into 'playing' geometry the puzzle game. Finding angle degrees, making parallel lines, making squared inside squares, etc. Expect the issue is I was constantly running into issues where I quite literally did not know the theory behind the questions being asked of me, and there's no hint button in the game besides 'explore' mode. Since all the answers have to be incredibly precise this 'explore' mode of seeing the otherwise obvious answer is quite useless. Another problem is you can't 'label' anything in the game. In geometry usually a side of a triangle will be labeled, after all this sort of abstraction is how we got proofs like A + B = C. Without the ability to mark anything in game you have to 'instill your own markers onto the game, which is ok for early puzzles but gets quickly overwhelming when the game wants you to make, say, a hexagon and you have a couple dozen indistinguishable circles and lines on the screen. This is probably in the justice of making the game artificially harder, which in theory puzzle experts would enjoy, what it really does though is people are using outside tools to solve puzzles, rendering it as an educational tool fruitless. Even when I was using a visual tutorial, I had problems following along, because it would use the abstraction as proof.
The other thing is you can't skip levels on the web version, so you just get to sit there feeling stumped until you look up the solution and find out how alien it is.
But the issue goes 1 piece forward more than that even. Because unless your geometry textbook introduces these theories in a conducive order, you're going to hit a wall where you 'cant come back'. Puzzle experts explain it as bad on ramping, and this game certainly suffers from it in the browser version, because there is no clean introduction to how the systems really work or what they do, more particularly that you have to input the intersections and vertices points yourself.
There's an even bigger problem: you cant play future levels unless you solved the current one your on. Which means you're always trapped in a dungeon of what feels like stupidity but is more often than not just a theoretical limit of average geometric in understanding. You will be solving the angles of a triangle, and then out of nowhere the concept of finding the 'cosign' of a line length the next.
And the worst part of it all is it doesn't keep you're puzzle solved so you can go back and look at it, if you missed it, oh well! You better solve it again, its good practice right? Except I'm trying to have fun here, not stress myself out slipping backwards. It really is quite tragic because the issues are genuinely quite easy to ameliorate: let people skip levels (or at least a certain number, like 4 or 5), and let people label things.
Honestly, from the perspective of integration tools this almost comes as a strong recommendation for what NOT to do as puzzle game design. The difficulty would constantly throttle, 4 levels that are generally easy followed by one I wouldn't have known without reading a textbook, this issue existed throughout the entire game, and not just later on as you might expect. I was stumped figuring out a bunch in the alpha stages!
It's ironic because these same issues of not being able to functionally label or simplify mechanisms is a haunting that follows a lot of puzzle games, including for example a lot of Zachtronics game, for example its what made me drop stuff that is inifinitely lauded in hardcore puzzle communities like spacechem and factorio. The reality is, I have trouble keeping track of things, which is why I can only try to play these pure puzzlers narrating my contemplation out to others. Intriguingly, this is why point and click games tend to thrive for me, no worries if you're having troubles with this problem, there's usually plenty to look at and figure out in the meantime, and the puzzle may just be BS anyway and so not worth kicking yourself mentally. Meanwhile, this is fucking geometry, even if the answer is extremely alien, you might get a nudging feeling that its on you for not getting it, which is exacerbated really hard by that lack of skip function.
Perhaps that's what's standing between me and good puzzle games, a label system. Honestly, the ability to skip around in a relaxing moodsetting games like Golf Peaks or Spring Falls highlight those a lot more in my mind even if they are more casual. The amount of levels you can skip for a long time and the 'self labeling' of objects is also probably what makes games like Baba is You exemplary in the genre.
Regardless, there's still a solid 4+ hours to be had with this if you're down for something a bit different, more if you break out the scratch paper or took a class before. It's a fascinating experiment in the sense that you really do feel on the edge of actually learning something more tangible, and it did make me realize that mathematics at large is basically an endless puzzle game for the mad. Also, a lot of the quotes at the end of each level have a lot of contextual flavor, its surprising how durable mathematical quotes are, my favorite one was from pascal:
"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth."
Logicians might hate it, and it may not have aged well considering how his wager got overturned, but I think there's still a scientific beauty in it both on the matter of the virtues of individuals you meet (who are often filled with contradictions in their preferences and taste, etc.) and the world which has contradictions imbedded from what we don't yet know about its operations. The fact it was able to uplift quotes like this to the forefront means it didn't completely fail on imparting neat gems of knowledge into the core of my functions.
Honestly, I got really far with relatively minimal use in comparison to what I expected, I was constantly belaboring my stupidity and she was like 'babe, this is ADVANCED GEOMETRY and you didn't even know signs and cosigns, what youre doing is far above what most people would even try to do', which is honestly probably true. To a degree it's funny because I got the special treatment of knowing that in this game I'm not actually an idiot*, its all relative and it soothed my negative self talk. But if you don't have people around informing you this you might feel more than a bit insecure, especially if you never actually took geometry like me so fair warning there. You and I imagine most people are a lot more smart on geometry than they might think since unless you have spatial issues its usually considered the most intuitive of all the maths (Ever cut through grass on a triangle shaped walkpath to get somewhere faster? That's geometry.)
That's pretty much all I have to say on this one. It's not often I leave a game abandoned because I'm under the impression I always might come back. So why not mark it as shelved. See, the reality is I would be cheating on all the answers at this point anyway since I've hit end game and its all trigonometry now, so I don't think it would 'count' as finished with this much content remaining anyway. I wouldn't feel fulfilled doing it and I dont even know how much a fundemental education would matter without the ability to label things anyway. I read this fascinating blogpost where a guy who cares a lot about common core and sees this as a great stepping tool for teaching the increasingly abandoned field of geometry, however, "I was not always able to find optimal solutions." which is fine but he hit the wall early on in stage 1.7 and then said "And yet, I was not able to crack Euclidea 10.6. I did it in GeoGebra" (an external open source free geometry program). Then he mentioned that one of the devs tipped him off with a big hint later. I'm sorry but if you are having to give hints to even the smartest players on external websites one on one, even after they are trying with external softwares, then you have not done a great job in making an accessible and easy to use modeling software for geometry. As a teaching tool or as a game.
Side note one the phone version then, trying to make precision connections on a phone is horrible since your finger is in the way, don't bother! I recommended it to my family since they help teach test taking skills and, as such, long for impossibly difficult puzzlers. But they couldn't even get past the UI and the later levels I'm stuck on would be painful on the tiny phone screen anyways. So if you do try it, play the web version.
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*This is foreshadowing for the next write up. Stay tuned. 👁️
-----------------------------------------------------------
It's not without merit, I'm all for geek games and if you're interested in geometry its worth a shot, but only if you have a video walk through handy. But it's incredibly frustrating and not really worth the effort as an edutainment game, as it suffers from some fairly ease of access related issues. I will now try to 'prove' why.
Well, it's literally just a geometry tool, I got tricked into 'playing' geometry the puzzle game. Finding angle degrees, making parallel lines, making squared inside squares, etc. Expect the issue is I was constantly running into issues where I quite literally did not know the theory behind the questions being asked of me, and there's no hint button in the game besides 'explore' mode. Since all the answers have to be incredibly precise this 'explore' mode of seeing the otherwise obvious answer is quite useless. Another problem is you can't 'label' anything in the game. In geometry usually a side of a triangle will be labeled, after all this sort of abstraction is how we got proofs like A + B = C. Without the ability to mark anything in game you have to 'instill your own markers onto the game, which is ok for early puzzles but gets quickly overwhelming when the game wants you to make, say, a hexagon and you have a couple dozen indistinguishable circles and lines on the screen. This is probably in the justice of making the game artificially harder, which in theory puzzle experts would enjoy, what it really does though is people are using outside tools to solve puzzles, rendering it as an educational tool fruitless. Even when I was using a visual tutorial, I had problems following along, because it would use the abstraction as proof.
The other thing is you can't skip levels on the web version, so you just get to sit there feeling stumped until you look up the solution and find out how alien it is.
But the issue goes 1 piece forward more than that even. Because unless your geometry textbook introduces these theories in a conducive order, you're going to hit a wall where you 'cant come back'. Puzzle experts explain it as bad on ramping, and this game certainly suffers from it in the browser version, because there is no clean introduction to how the systems really work or what they do, more particularly that you have to input the intersections and vertices points yourself.
There's an even bigger problem: you cant play future levels unless you solved the current one your on. Which means you're always trapped in a dungeon of what feels like stupidity but is more often than not just a theoretical limit of average geometric in understanding. You will be solving the angles of a triangle, and then out of nowhere the concept of finding the 'cosign' of a line length the next.
And the worst part of it all is it doesn't keep you're puzzle solved so you can go back and look at it, if you missed it, oh well! You better solve it again, its good practice right? Except I'm trying to have fun here, not stress myself out slipping backwards. It really is quite tragic because the issues are genuinely quite easy to ameliorate: let people skip levels (or at least a certain number, like 4 or 5), and let people label things.
Honestly, from the perspective of integration tools this almost comes as a strong recommendation for what NOT to do as puzzle game design. The difficulty would constantly throttle, 4 levels that are generally easy followed by one I wouldn't have known without reading a textbook, this issue existed throughout the entire game, and not just later on as you might expect. I was stumped figuring out a bunch in the alpha stages!
It's ironic because these same issues of not being able to functionally label or simplify mechanisms is a haunting that follows a lot of puzzle games, including for example a lot of Zachtronics game, for example its what made me drop stuff that is inifinitely lauded in hardcore puzzle communities like spacechem and factorio. The reality is, I have trouble keeping track of things, which is why I can only try to play these pure puzzlers narrating my contemplation out to others. Intriguingly, this is why point and click games tend to thrive for me, no worries if you're having troubles with this problem, there's usually plenty to look at and figure out in the meantime, and the puzzle may just be BS anyway and so not worth kicking yourself mentally. Meanwhile, this is fucking geometry, even if the answer is extremely alien, you might get a nudging feeling that its on you for not getting it, which is exacerbated really hard by that lack of skip function.
Perhaps that's what's standing between me and good puzzle games, a label system. Honestly, the ability to skip around in a relaxing moodsetting games like Golf Peaks or Spring Falls highlight those a lot more in my mind even if they are more casual. The amount of levels you can skip for a long time and the 'self labeling' of objects is also probably what makes games like Baba is You exemplary in the genre.
Regardless, there's still a solid 4+ hours to be had with this if you're down for something a bit different, more if you break out the scratch paper or took a class before. It's a fascinating experiment in the sense that you really do feel on the edge of actually learning something more tangible, and it did make me realize that mathematics at large is basically an endless puzzle game for the mad. Also, a lot of the quotes at the end of each level have a lot of contextual flavor, its surprising how durable mathematical quotes are, my favorite one was from pascal:
"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth."
Logicians might hate it, and it may not have aged well considering how his wager got overturned, but I think there's still a scientific beauty in it both on the matter of the virtues of individuals you meet (who are often filled with contradictions in their preferences and taste, etc.) and the world which has contradictions imbedded from what we don't yet know about its operations. The fact it was able to uplift quotes like this to the forefront means it didn't completely fail on imparting neat gems of knowledge into the core of my functions.
Honestly, I got really far with relatively minimal use in comparison to what I expected, I was constantly belaboring my stupidity and she was like 'babe, this is ADVANCED GEOMETRY and you didn't even know signs and cosigns, what youre doing is far above what most people would even try to do', which is honestly probably true. To a degree it's funny because I got the special treatment of knowing that in this game I'm not actually an idiot*, its all relative and it soothed my negative self talk. But if you don't have people around informing you this you might feel more than a bit insecure, especially if you never actually took geometry like me so fair warning there. You and I imagine most people are a lot more smart on geometry than they might think since unless you have spatial issues its usually considered the most intuitive of all the maths (Ever cut through grass on a triangle shaped walkpath to get somewhere faster? That's geometry.)
That's pretty much all I have to say on this one. It's not often I leave a game abandoned because I'm under the impression I always might come back. So why not mark it as shelved. See, the reality is I would be cheating on all the answers at this point anyway since I've hit end game and its all trigonometry now, so I don't think it would 'count' as finished with this much content remaining anyway. I wouldn't feel fulfilled doing it and I dont even know how much a fundemental education would matter without the ability to label things anyway. I read this fascinating blogpost where a guy who cares a lot about common core and sees this as a great stepping tool for teaching the increasingly abandoned field of geometry, however, "I was not always able to find optimal solutions." which is fine but he hit the wall early on in stage 1.7 and then said "And yet, I was not able to crack Euclidea 10.6. I did it in GeoGebra" (an external open source free geometry program). Then he mentioned that one of the devs tipped him off with a big hint later. I'm sorry but if you are having to give hints to even the smartest players on external websites one on one, even after they are trying with external softwares, then you have not done a great job in making an accessible and easy to use modeling software for geometry. As a teaching tool or as a game.
Side note one the phone version then, trying to make precision connections on a phone is horrible since your finger is in the way, don't bother! I recommended it to my family since they help teach test taking skills and, as such, long for impossibly difficult puzzlers. But they couldn't even get past the UI and the later levels I'm stuck on would be painful on the tiny phone screen anyways. So if you do try it, play the web version.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*This is foreshadowing for the next write up. Stay tuned. 👁️