A great, tight, puzzle game that doesn't overstay it's welcome.

Botany Manor provides a novel, and unique, set of puzzles which are all about botany during the 18th century England. Taking me a little under 4 to complete the game doesn't give itself any time to get long in the tooth and that is to it's credit resulting in all of the puzzles feeling engaging and enjoyable as opposed to tedious.

It provides little in terms of story, but just enough to have a payoff after the credits roll. Which is another aspect of the game that works in its favour, as is the case with quite a few indie puzzle games where too much of a focus is put on a poor story that drags the rest of the game with it.

Accompanying the puzzles is an equally enjoyable setting, in which the game takes place - the titular Botany Manor, in the Somerset Countryside providing the player with an enjoyable set of views for the duration of the game. Which is further backed up by the games stylistic approach. Working hand in hand with the games art style the music to the game provides a relaxing atmosphere that doesn't grate on the ears, further enhancing the experience.

My only major gripe with the game would be that the sprint mechanic seemed to kick in as and when it wanted despite me having it toggled on the entire time. Sometimes I would move at a quick pace, but other times I would be going no quicker than the games walk speed. Sadly this elongated some of the late game puzzles which involved quite an amount of back and forth throughout the manor lands for me.

A Short Hike + Sword = Lil Gator Game

That's basically what this one comes down to. What's interesting to me is that I definitely enjoyed this more than A Short Hike. Why? It all comes down to expectations.

By the time I got around to playing A Short Hike, it was already a bonafide indie darling -- one that, judging from its review scores, could be considered one of the greatest indie games of all time. So when I played it and found that it was just a short, pleasant (albeit well-executed) platformer, I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed.

Before playing Lil Gator Game, on the other hand, I had zero expectations. And because of this it was a lot easier for me to just accept it for what it is -- a pleasant, short game inspired by A Short Hike, Wind Waker, and Breath of the Wild.

Running around an island and slashing cardboard enemies is mindless, yes, but not every game needs to be Battletoads or Mega Man 2. The writing is a bit too self-aware and the story didn't hit me in the feels like I suspect it hoped to, but the gameplay was engaging enough to keep me invested until the end. Is it a masterpiece? Not by any means. But if you subscribe to Game Pass and three hours to kill, you could do a lot worse than spending them on this game.

I would not have thought to ask the question "what if A Short Hike were about a child running around pretending to be Link in Breath of the Wild?", but I'm sure glad the developers of Lil Gator Game did. An unbelievably charming small-scale open-world exploration game with BOTW-inspired traversal mechanics (climbing on any surface with an upgradeable stamina meter, a glider, a shield you can surf downhill on), writing that's genuinely endearing in its depiction of childhood and growing up without coming across as overly affected, and an open world that's just the right size and density for it to be fun to explore without much in the way of navigational aids. The only reason I didn't give this a perfect rating is that I occasionally wished for more mechanically involving quest design (they usually don't involve much more than talking to one character or easily collecting/smashing a nearby item) or more bespoke platforming or puzzle challenges to make full use of the traversal toolset, but those are ultimately fairly minor complaints given how delightfully compact an experience the rest of the game is.

Live life altruistically.

Nothing matters.

Everything matters.

About 30 hours in and I've hit a wall with the free puzzles, I'll most likely buy the GAS DLC puzzles in the future but I'll log those separately when I do.

Probably the single best YouTuber game ever made and it's not even close. It's hard to understate how much this game's reinvigorated my interest for sudoku and, more broadly, the entire Nikoli-school of pencil and paper puzzle games like Kakuro and Akari/Light Up. A cursory glance at Cracking the Cryptic may cause someone to be like "oh, only a small fraction of these are for free? that's sad" but these are no normal sudoku puzzles. Almost everything here is a type of variant sudoku; the most popular variant of sudoku is Killer Sudoku, but there are loads and almost every single puzzle here has some novel combination of variants that forces you to think in a new way every time. As such, if you're already experienced in normal sudoku, these puzzles force you to think rather than repeat the same old methods to solve any puzzle, and usually take a fair bit longer and are also way, way more mentally fulfilling to complete.

If you've played a lot of and burnt out of normal sudoku, you need to play this game, full stop. It's the freshest take on the game since its conception and it'll remind you of what made you love it in the first place. Depending on your existing sudoku skill level, the number of levels you get out of this before tapping out may vary but the earlier difficulties are stellar at introducing the sorts of things levels will ask you to keep track of, and it doesn't take super long to ramp up and difficulty and get to your first puzzle with no traditional number hints, which are always insanely satisfying to slowly chip away at.

My biggest problems are that the hints, especially in harder levels, aren't very good at explaining and often become indigestible with the amount of coordinates and candidate numbers sometimes thrown at the player. It's the main reason I didn't persist with the later puzzles, often you're put in a puzzle, have no clue where to start, and click the hint and get something that's barely helpful at all. But even in their dubiously helpful nature, they highlight the main reason why you would ever consider paying for sudoku puzzles when you could easily just look them up and get an inexhaustible amount of them: these are hand-designed puzzles. They are designed with a player in mind, they are designed to be able to be approachable and deducible. The human-designed sudoku puzzles here have machine generated sudoku handily beaten as far as "A-ha!" moments go, even if they do get a little impenetrable at higher star difficulties. It would be almost impossible to get a machine to generate sudoku puzzles as varied and novel as these and still have them be solve-able, but having them human-made makes it so that it's guaranteed there is a "best path of deduction" that makes finding it feel so much more of a worthwhile pursuit.

But yes, the long and short of it is that this is wonderful. If you're a long-time fan of sudoku, or even someone who has a passing interest in it but got bored quickly due to its monotony once you've got a lot of the big skills down, this is a no brainer recommendation, especially considering how much you can get out of it without paying a dime.

Completed:
3/3 Sample Domino Puzzles
7/7 Variety Pack
11/23 500K Subscriber Celebration