This game was SO CLOSE to being good, it’s tragic.

This is a puzzle game. For controls, you can only move in the cardinal directions with the D-pad, push objects (that can be pushed, like text) by walking into them, and undo your moves by pushing the X button. The core gameplay revolves around rearranging the text to change objects’ properties: each “sentence” starts with an object-text, followed by an IS, then ended with a property-text; if an object doesn’t have any corresponding sentences, it’s a background object.

By itself, that’s a decent premise for a puzzle game, and to the game’s credit, it has quite a few genuinely challenging stages. However, it doesn’t take long for the game to start running counter to its established mechanics. It starts subtle: in the 7th world map level, the goal is blocked by HOT objects and you MELT if you touch them; also, you’re unable to change either of these properties due to their proximity to the level’s edge (or other objects that will STOP you). The only thing you can do is give the HOT objects the PUSH property as well, but you’ll still MELT, right? Nope; turns out PUSH overwrites HOT in this case, letting you push the HOT objects out of the way and reach the goal. That may not seem like much, but this is far from the only time where certain properties overwrite other properties, and the game makes no effort to show their hierarchy (I don’t know what order they are in the pause menu, but it isn’t this). Heck, the game actively makes you create and use new combinations in already-tricky levels, but since it makes no effort to guide you on what’s different, you’re just left to figure it out yourself through trial and error.

Worse still is when the game introduces brand new mechanics or properties (again, in already tricky levels with no guidance on how they work). 1-8 seems like an ordinary level, except you’re surrounded by DEFEAT tiles and the respective sentence is not only outside your cage, but next to the level’s edge and thus can’t be undone. Turns out, fifteen levels into the game, you’re supposed to create an “[object] IS [object]” sentence, something the game has never shown you or even hinted is possible. Then, in 1-9, the game shows you that you can create “[object] IS [object]” sentences by having the flag turn into a rock on your first move! So infuriating; why wasn’t that level first? Then you’ve got the FLOAT property, introduced World 2, but it’s almost exclusively used to prevent text from interacting with anything by surrounding a “TEXT IS FLOAT” sentence by STOP tiles, and it’s done so often that it can be hard to notice when text isn’t float; worse, many of the times you do get to interact with the FLOAT text, it’s because you have to do something new with it, even though the game has barely given you experience with how it normally works (looking at you, Queue).

At this point (World 2 complete, minus Evaporating River), I had my grievances, but still had faith that the game would get better; if I couldn’t solve a level, I just skipped it for the time being (I even managed to solve Prison and Tiny Isle on my own). Problem is, the game isn’t done introducing arbitrary stuff, and it continues introducing arbitrary stuff throughout the game (and even into postgame!). A good puzzle game makes sure you know all the game’s mechanics and possible interactions before getting challenging; that way, you have an implicit promise that all the puzzles can be solved using what you know, and if you’re stuck, you just need to think about it a bit more. With this game, not only does it keep introducing new stuff, it never explains them in any way, nor does it even so much as design the levels so that you’d encounter and understand the new mechanics naturally. This means that when you reach a level like Priority Lane or The Return of Scenic Pond, you can never be sure if you actually have the knowledge to solve it or if the game is pulling something out of its ass again. I’m sure people would try to justify them as requiring “out of the box” thinking, but that’s just an excuse to have puzzle mechanics that aren’t consistent. A truly great puzzle game will tell you the exact dimensions of the box and make sure all puzzles can be solved by thinking within said box, yet still be challenging. Sutte Hakkun did it, Toki Tori 1 did it, Wargroove did it–heck, even Prince Yeh Rude (a bootleg game) managed to pull it off somewhat, so what’s with people’s insistence that “regularly introducing new stuff=good game design?” It isn’t, and this game is why! Sure, you could theoretically solve Ghost Friend on your own, but it won’t be an “a-ha!” moment as much as a “maybe this random thing will work–wait, it did?!” Stumbling across that solution on my own was what finally convinced me to look up a walkthrough for the levels I’d skipped (and any others I felt were taking me too long to solve).

Sure, there were several levels I looked up that ended up having regular solutions (leading me to check Baba Is Hint first once I stumbled across it), but there’s still many solutions that border on Adventure Game moon logic, where no mere hint will help you. For example, World 5 introduces SHIFT: it causes objects to act like a conveyor belt, pushing any overlapping tile in the direction it’s facing. It has a few less-than-obvious effects, but the one I think we can all agree makes no sense is the one required for Lock the Door: when you unlock the goal, its path is blocked by a DEFEAT tile, so you need to have the goal unlock after you’re past it. Thing is, you don’t have access to a MOVE text, meaning you can’t let an NPC unlock the goal for you. In fact, you only have access to two different objects, their respective text blocks, PUSH, SHIFT, and two ISs. How do you clear this level? Turns out, you need to apply SHIFT to yourself since you can’t PUSH one of the objects out of its corner normally, then push both objects onto each other facing the WIN text, then give both of them SHIFT which causes them to push each other forward perpetually. That’s two suddenly-required nonsensical mechanics that the player hasn’t even so much as had the opportunity to experiment with them in earlier levels.

But it keeps getting worse, because World 6 introduces EMPTY, an object that doesn’t act like any other object. See, normally, when you push an object, it moves. When you push EMPTY, nothing changes visually; what happens is that the EMPTY that gets pushed onto the background object disappears and a new EMPTY spawns behind you. If you make an “EMPTY IS [object] IS YOU” sentence, moving the new you off of the tile means it’s empty again, and a new you spawns (required in 6-2, not shown off until 6-3). If EMPTY is you, a similar effect as “EMPTY IS PUSH” happens: you push every pushable object that’s adjacent to an empty tile in the opposite direction (meaning if a background object is below an object, you can’t push it upward). Then you’ve got Power Generator, where being “near” empty will kill you, but being on an empty tile that’s also near an empty tile won’t kill you. I swear, the game’s mechanics were designed around the solutions rather than the solutions designed around the mechanics. Keep in mind you’d normally have to figure all this out yourself through trial and error.

There’s a ton of stuff like this, but detailing everything will take too long, so I’ll just highlight some other stuff that got on my nerves. World 4 has three levels where the solution requires using NOT text (never before seen) in a different way for each level, then you never see NOT text again until postgame (and maybe one level in World 8). World 5 has a similar situation for SWAP text, but while the first four levels aren’t too bad, the fifth requires you to use the effect to clip into STOP tiles, even though the entire rest of the game up to that point has shown you that STOP tiles will STOP you from moving onto them. Heck, there are several levels that require you to overlap objects that you can’t push onto each other, and many of them require you to do it in a new way. By the time I got to the latter half of World 8, I was better able to solve the puzzles on my own because I actually knew about the mechanics the game wanted me to use, but 8-3 decided to add a way for you to move upward when you have the FALL property applied to you and make you guess that’s what you have to do in the first place (and then the entire rest of the game never uses this, yet another problem with adding too many gimmicks into a game). Also, rather than introduce Fragile Existence as the first level in a world like Depths so you know what’s up (and have said world be accessible from the main island), you instead have to figure out how to reach the postgame in a similar manner as how you figure out half the rest of the game: taking a wild guess.

So yeah, I don’t think I can recommend this game. If it had just gotten rid of the more arbitrary and gimmicky mechanics (namely ALL, EMPTY, NOT, and maybe SWAP and FLOAT as well) and had a better difficulty curve, this game could’ve been something special, maybe even surpassed Sutte Hakkun as my favorite game. Instead, it’s barely a few steps above The Witness. I really wanted to like this game, too…

Disappointment of the year 2019.

P.S. In the past, I said that games should “build on their mechanics.” After playing this game, I now realize that wasn’t the correct way to phrase what I meant, and I’ll make an effort to be clearer in the future.