Aqorel is a very pleasant game to look at. It has a papery filter over everything, there are nice physics with the objects you can play around with, and the color palette is great.

However, it's not that nice to... listen to... The music is composed of very short loops with jarring instruments and unmelodic riffs.

The puzzles of the game itself ramp up in difficulty very slowly, and never quite reach a point of being cleverly challenging. The hardest levels were the ones where it looked like there were a ton of things going on, while in reality there is a pretty linear path to the goal.

It's a short game, and none of the puzzles were outright bad, just sometimes too simple or too much in favor of adding complexity without driving towards that satisfying cleverness of a good puzzle.

This is the hardest puzzle game I have ever played.

Upon completion of all of the level sets, I'm still not sure if that is an overstatement or not! If not, it's the hardest puzzle game I have ever completed.

This game basically leaves no concept, no matter how devious, untouched. It gets so complex, you really have to rewire your brain just to handle it. In my most desperate moments, I tried writing down what was happening, but even that was difficult and in the end I felt like gaining skill with the mechanics was superior to a more methodical, slow approach.

Running into paradoxes was both frustrating and exciting, especially when you don't expect it. On the one hand, you're attempt at the level is dead. On the other, HERE'S ANOTHER TOTALLY DIFFERENT REALLY HARD LEVEL! I think overall I appreciated that an end wasn't completely an end, however...

Losing all your progress in a level can really suck. The set-ups get pretty intricate and if nothing else, re-setting them up becomes a chore. The last thing I want to do after reaching a sort of Game Over state is commit myself to a totally different puzzle.

Other gripe is that this game hardly makes any sort of attempt or even guiding hand towards its more intricate mechanics. It took me far too long to understand how exactly the enchanted items were functioning and how some paradoxes were occurring, and the most help I got was the ring man going "oh geez, looks like something strange is happening here. Oh dear oh my". I stopped using the ring about 10 levels in when I realized it was not really adding to my experience.

Still a great puzzle game. Love it. Just add a rewind feature and it's nearly perfect.

Yeah! It was lots of fun. While the game relies on gravity (sensible physics), it also starts allowing you to push things that you are standing on (not sensible physics, but really fun!). I actually got used to that and utilized it a bunch, so great choice! But later on, you can destroy parts of large crates and they just sorta maintain their original shape, but with the crates in-between missing? Like you can have 2 crates that aren't touching whatsoever and they are still quantum-linked or something so when you push one, it pushes the other. I didn't really like that as it created invisible walls and allowed some levels to be completed it what had to have been an unintended way. But, it's always a rare but satisfying thing to break a puzzle game in a clever way.

RIP all the crate dudes I sacrificed along the way to 100% o7

Mario Golf: Super Rush is an empty husk of a game and the epitome of Nintendo's long and relentless journey towards making all of their games as soulless as possible.

The adventure mode is horrendously bland and pointless, it's linear to the point where you question why they even put all the time and effort into making it if all you do is travel from A to B to C and play the same courses over and over. The only things to do besides playing courses to reach the extremely anticlimactic ending is: talk to nameless Mario brand characters who say words, all of which are instantly forgotten, play practice missions which actually teach you some techniques but at the cost of doing them over and over until you memorize how to hit the shots as wanted, or buy gear at the stores which are completely useless unless they are the gear for the specific course you are about to play next in the plot. Speaking of plot, the story is eye-wateringly contrived and miserable. You drift apart from the only friends you have in the world to follow the whims of some nameless god in order to beat some sort of evil snow thing, but it really doesn't matter, by the end you will have forgotten why you did any of this and you are rewarded with nothing beyond some text on the screen trying to convince you that you did something meaningful, but you have not.

The golf is almost fine but still manages to be bad. The accuracy for each shot is not only randomly determined but also predetermined, so you get the worst of all worlds. You can't know how your shot's accuracy will line up when you hit it, but if you restart the match, now you do. Scoring a birdie/eagle/albatross/hole in one is rewarded with your character doing a spin and smiling or something, there are only two animations and neither are that congratulatory. This actually lines up pretty well with the fact that if you are running on the course, you will not be able to see any impressive shots you make, and there are no replays. If a ball falls into a hole and no one is there to see it, does it even matter? The accuracy shift, the redline of the shots, also doesn't matter. The wind hardly matters. Club choice depending on terrain doesn't matter. Just hit the ball to the next spot so that you can hit the ball to the next spot.

This is a bad video game and no one should play it. Actually, it's worse than that. It's a competently made video game that has no point in existing, other than to cause distress and regret. I write this review to try to cope with the fact that I spent sixty dollars to play an awful golf game by the developers who made Advanced Tour.

This game is such a weird mix of polish and tarnish. I went like 10 levels into this game ready to drop it because the levels were so linear and boring, then suddenly the difficulty was amped up and the puzzles got pretty interesting! And there's some great game design, like the transition between orientations which is super clean to the point it just feels natural, but there's some horrible game design, like how the dark platforms have no sort of outline when they are turned off.

Overall, I enjoyed Disoriented and am glad I stuck through to the end, but also, huh?? Polish this sucker up and it's an awesome first person puzzler!

Very short puzzle game, 48 levels that took me about 2 hours in total to finish. The idea is cute, though I think there was still a lot left to explore with it. The controls/UI are really not great, there are 3 buttons on screen with a < symbol, a U, and a "restart"/"redo" looking character. At some point I confused all 3 of these for another button, and because there's no warning prompts, often reset a puzzle when I meant to undo a single move. Pieces should be more clearly highlighted when you are selecting their next move. A lot of the puzzles had straightforward solutions that could've been "disguised" better. I think I cheesed some levels because there were unused pieces/areas. Kinda fun for what it's worth.

Ah, Pompom. I love it for what it does right, I hate it for what it does wrong.

Pompom is a fantastic game - as long as you play it as the creator intended! That's not necessarily a bad thing, most puzzle games have you find the logic to arrive at a satisfying solution, and I think Pompom counts as a puzzle game. And it's great to find the intended solution, watching the hamster bounce off of enemies just in time and land neatly onto each platform. However, the game's best moments are when you totally wing it and manage to catch every pitfall and stumble into a perfect combination of mistakes that somehow lead you to victory. The problem is these styles of play - solving a puzzle and creating your own solution - are totally at odds with each other.

I often found myself struggling to get past a section, getting SO close to collecting all the coins while maneuvering past the obstacles, just to get hit, slam escape and hit "Reset to Checkpoint" once again. Then, finally, when I'm almost ready to give up, I try a different method - and everything starts lining up instantly. All my struggles were not really necessary, the solution was right there, I was just doing it the "wrong way". And sometimes, I never find the "right way". I end up carefully conserving the bubble to grab the coins and escape past the area that I could not get past properly, either because I didn't have enough items, enough time to stop and think up a solution, or I couldn't figure out the intended route.

It's about time I mentioned that Pompom is EXTREMELY ambitious: nearly every single level throws a new gameplay mechanic at you that totally resets your mastery of the game back to zero. So all these frustrating moments were temporary, once I got through them it was almost certain I'd never see a level like it again. And the ways the levels explain to you what the new tool is going to do before you try it yourself, or how the new enemy will function before you have any items to avoid it with, are astoundingly clever. It functions so well in a game that doesn't let you control the character, but it's a feature that could have easily been missed. Like, for example, in the Temple Zone level where you get the rope, and it doesn't explain how to use it! Wasn't that confusing and annoying? Well, at least there's something to compare against.

At the same time, if a game has 100 different mechanics, it's unlikely they will all be perfect. It's not always clear what parts can be interacted with, or what those interactions will do. I think some sort of highlighting around any clickable parts (like the buoys, the chandeliers, etc) would go a long way. The controls can also be a bit frustrating. Because the game only has two buttons - left and right click - they sometimes overlap each other. More times than I can count, I have accidentally placed an item while trying to click an interactable object or pop the 2nd chance bubble, and because I placed that item, now I'm short a item, and now something is blocked off by that item, now I need to try to die on purpose to try and salvage this run - it can easily be the thing that kills an attempt.

Despite a large portion of the credits going out to testers, I don't think the levels were playtested enough. There are some levels that I can see from the developer's perspective made so much sense, but just don't come across that way to a first-time player. For example, there is a level in Spooky Zone with levers that rotate the entire stage. One section has a lever in an awkward spot - kinda hard to grab, but doable with some clever block placement. This leads to a cache of coins + the carrot, awesome! The only thing is it is extremely difficult to get back to the level after this. I struggled for so long with it before realizing I wasn't meant to grab that awkward lever, it was supposed to be used later, after rotating the level. But because it COULD be grabbed and DID lead to the treasure, I was sure I was doing it right!

For a genre of game that doesn't have much to build off of (maybe Lemmings or Oddworld? I have played neither), this game got so much right. It's easy to point out it's failures and shortcomings, but it's genuinely amazing at times how the central idea was so fully fleshed out. And the artstyle is absolutely spot-on. This game feels like a long lost SNES title. Every detail down to the repeated "Pompom, You can do it!" at the end of every zone, the little skits that play out during opening cutscenes, the simple goofiness of some of the spritework, the wonderful, 16 bit soundtrack, are so endearing.

Pompom can be wonderful. It's concept is refreshingly new, it's clever with how it uses it, the game always feels fun and alive. Pompom can also be awful. It's frustratingly rigid, unfair at the worst possible moments, and the spicy pepper level is too gosh dang hard. But I played through the whole thing, always eager to see what new challenge I was to overcome next.