hmmmm

(For context, I'm a puzzle maniac, and loved for example Baba Is You and Can of Wormholes. This particular game just rubbed me the wrong way. Just thought I'd clarify before anyone says I have a skill issue)

TLDR: The early game was fantastic for reasons pretty well-documented in the other reviews. Then the late game committed 6 unforgivable puzzle sins all at once. I think my overwhelming disappointment with the late game was greater (although only slightly) than my overwhelming...appointment(?) with the early game, so the review is negative. I still got 50 hours out of the game for 2 main reasons:

• By the time the game stopped being fun, I was already invested enough that I didn't notice for a while.
  
• I didn't go in blind. I went in knowing some of the more troll-y stuff this game does (explained later), so a lot of the mysteries that otherwise would've been unfair to solve had already been solved for me.

Alright, now here's everything I didn't like about the later game. Sorry if I end up seeming a bit harsh here, this part of the game just absolutely filled me to the brim with salt.

• Unlike most games like this, most of the puzzles in this game have red herrings. Eventually, this becomes so egregious that the entire puzzle just becomes finding the one spot in the level that is actually useful, and the entire rest is all red herrings. This is the polar opposite of good puzzle design. It feels like they wanted more content for the game, so they made the exact same puzzle 50 times. This became such a chore that I never finished all the captures in the hell area.
  
• There's also a handful of puzzles that are simply trolls. They're unmarked too, so you could very easily spend hours on one trying to look for a solution that can actually be deduced from the information you already know. There's about 8 of these, so I won't list them all, but by far the worst offender is NW?-25, the literal impossible puzzle. I've seen someone spend over an hour on that bunny alone, not knowing it's impossible to capture or do anything with.
  
• The baby bunnies are actually genius until you get ~250 of them. Before that point, you CONSTANTLY see new opportunities for baby combinations to try, so much so that by the time you've finished trying one, you're thinking of like 5 new ones. It was great and some of the most fun I've ever had in a puzzle game. After that though, I hit a brick wall. There were not a lot of possibilities remaining, and actually getting them to work became pretty challenging too. I like hard puzzles, but not when you don't even know whether they're possible or the baby combination you're pursuing is actually just a dead end. Thankfully the dev is planning to fix this by adding a hint system that unlocks around when it stopped being fun for me.
  
• There's a set of baby bunnies late-game that takes about an hour to execute once you know what to do. I don't think I need to say more.
  
• One of the hidden rules is that bunnies go 25% faster when in tunnels. If you tried to use the new hidden mechanic that got added in an update and it didn't work, this is probably why. I have no idea what the motivation was behind this rule's existence, no one person is ever going to figure it out and just...yeah. It sucks.
  
• I'm just going to outright say that 100% gates are stupid. There is simply no point in forcing me to play literally everything in your game before being able to progress, especially when like half of it (maybe more) I don't find fun in the slightest. I suggest, when the endgame update happens, that the capture requirement AND the baby requirement are lowered. As I said, I also don't want to solve the rest of the captures. Also, maybe make it clear the game isn't finished before the very last moment? I've seen multiple people try to grind out the 100% requirements, thinking there was a reward for that, only to realize there wasn't yet.

Comments open.

buns :D