tl;dr DO NOT BUY THIS, IT IS BAD.

First the good parts, the animation is gorgeous. Though as a slightly sad note, all that gorgeous animation is a 13GB download so maybe start it a bit before you want to play. The music is also quite nice, though in places extremely derivative of Amanita games, specifically Botanicula and Machinarium (the later of which seems to have been a major :cough: influence on the whole game).

The bad part: the game itself. The puzzle design wavers between atrocious and probable plagiarism. The latter first, and these might technically be spoilers but you can't spoil something this gross. They do the "wolf, goat, vegetable" puzzle played completely straight, no complexities and new angles, it's even literally a wolf, a goat, and a turnip. Also one of the last puzzles in the game is literally the water jug puzzle from Die Hard 3, the same size jugs and everything. Many of the other puzzles have extreme time pressure on them. You can repeat them as many times as you need but if you aren't exactly as fast with a mouse as the devs, sucks to be you. Do you have any kind of mobility issues in your hands? Don't even bother, you won't get more than half-way through. This is especially glaring giving the lovely chill tone the animation and music work so hard to create. Two of the puzzles I have absolutely no idea how you were supposed to solve them, other than brute force. I _think_ one of them had audio cues on the first run but if so I didn't hear them over the movie I was watching on another screen and again, sucks to be me. There are a few interesting puzzles mixed in, like exactly one fun use of a time travel mechanic, it's the same puzzle as everyone always does with time travel but at least it wasn't a literal copy of something as old as puzzle books themselves. On top of uncreative or outright obstinate design, the controls are rather fiddly which only amplifies the difficulty of a few timed sections and makes a few solutions very hard to notice (hint: many small objects have multiple interaction zones, often with no indication of this). One of the headline features of switching between the girl and her robot form serves literally no purpose I was able to discern other than making you sit through slow animations when you misclick. There is never a puzzle where you need to careful switch from one to the other in some special order, or any reason to not have a single character that can both lift heavy things (robo-mode) and climb on short boxes (girl). It's cute that many interactions have different animations for both forms but they just never do anything interesting with it.

The 6.7 hours for this was to beat the full game and that includes stopping for dinner and leaving it running. Maybe 2-3 hours tops depending on how long you're willing to be frustrated before using the hints system (which is a dexterity minigame, again I hope you're quick with a mouse or no hints for you). Short would be fine if it wasn't laughable at times. The end of act one has the voiceover saying "and they having gathered all the tools she returned" and I actually shouted out loud "but I only got one tool". Maybe they planned more and had already recorded it, who knows. Short games are great but when half of it is already recycled content, you're getting into "maybe next time just make a short animated video?" territory.

If you haven't played Machinarium, go play that instead and if you have, maybe just go play it again, it's still great.

tl;dr DO NOT BUY THIS, IT IS BAD. First the good parts, the animation is gorgeous. Though as a slightly sad note, all that gorgeous animation is a 13GB download so maybe start it a bit before you want to play. The music is also quite nice, though in places extremely derivative of Amanita games, specifically Botanicula and Machinarium (the later of which seems to have been a major :cough: influence on the whole game). The bad part: the game itself. The puzzle design wavers between atrocious and probable plagiarism. The latter first, and these might technically be spoilers but you can't spoil something this gross. They do the "wolf, goat, vegetable" puzzle played completely straight, no complexities and new angles, it's even literally a wolf, a goat, and a turnip. Also one of the last puzzles in the game is literally the water jug puzzle from Die Hard 3, the same size jugs and everything. Many of the other puzzles have extreme time pressure on them. You can repeat them as many times as you need but if you aren't exactly as fast with a mouse as the devs, sucks to be you. Do you have any kind of mobility issues in your hands? Don't even bother, you won't get more than half-way through. This is especially glaring giving the lovely chill tone the animation and music work so hard to create. Two of the puzzles I have absolutely no idea how you were supposed to solve them, other than brute force. I _think_ one of them had audio cues on the first run but if so I didn't hear them over the movie I was watching on another screen and again, sucks to be me. There are a few interesting puzzles mixed in, like exactly one fun use of a time travel mechanic, it's the same puzzle as everyone always does with time travel but at least it wasn't a literal copy of something as old as puzzle books themselves. On top of uncreative or outright obstinate design, the controls are rather fiddly which only amplifies the difficulty of a few timed sections and makes a few solutions very hard to notice (hint: many small objects have multiple interaction zones, often with no indication of this). One of the headline features of switching between the girl and her robot form serves literally no purpose I was able to discern other than making you sit through slow animations when you misclick. There is never a puzzle where you need to careful switch from one to the other in some special order, or any reason to not have a single character that can both lift heavy things (robo-mode) and climb on short boxes (girl). It's cute that many interactions have different animations for both forms but they just never do anything interesting with it. The 6.7 hours for this was to beat the full game and that includes stopping for dinner and leaving it running. Maybe 2-3 hours tops depending on how long you're willing to be frustrated before using the hints system (which is a dexterity minigame, again I hope you're quick with a mouse or no hints for you). Short would be fine if it wasn't laughable at times. The end of act one has the voiceover saying "and they having gathered all the tools she returned" and I actually shouted out loud "but I only got one tool". Maybe they planned more and had already recorded it, who knows. Short games are great but when half of it is already recycled content, you're getting into "maybe next time just make a short animated video?" territory. If you haven't played Machinarium, go play that instead and if you have, maybe just go play it again, it's still great.