As you might expect if you’ve read some of my previous posts, I’ve had another string of disappointments recently. Aquarius ended up being a wave-based arena shooter where level design has almost no impact on the repetitive gameplay, and when I reached level 2, I decided to take a break, only to realize level 2 never actually unlocked on the stage select, so I gave up. Then I tried Defense Grid: The Awakening for a while, only to realize around halfway through that I still don’t like Tower Defense/RTS games. Next was INSIDE, which I gave a chance despite not liking LIMBO or Monochroma or Black the Fall, but less than six minutes in, there’s a chase scene where you can get tripped by barely-visible logs (in any other game, they’d be purely decorative) and captured, so I quit pretty quickly in anticipation of the rest of the game being that heavy on trial-and-error. Finally was Panzer Ball, but on top of the ball-based movement momentum, it has an awkward jumping mechanic where you have to hold the button to charge a meter (your jump height is based on how full the meter is when you let go), and worse, it has another awkward “unique” mechanic where you get a speed boost if you jump right at the edge of a platform, and of course you need that boost to reach various mandatory platforms on top of having to fight against your momentum as soon as you reach the next tiny platform so you don’t slide off. Once again, I stopped after only a few levels.

Luckily, after all that, I ended up playing a good game:

• B.i.t.Lock
  

  12 hours playtime

  8 of 8 achievements

Grid-based puzzle. You move different blocks (all at once) with the D-pad/arrow keys, and the goal is to get the blocks to align with the outline; too few or too many in the group means it doesn’t count. You can also undo individual moves with the X button or Z key, as well as reset the entire puzzle from the pause menu. The first level could’ve done a better job of letting you know that the white blocks don’t stick together despite there being no seam when they’re next to each other, but at the same time, it doesn’t take much to figure it out as is.

Some of the levels in world 1 actually take a bit of thought to solve, but when you make it to world 2, you’ll realize that the difficulty curve in the game is pretty wonky. This is partly due to the game constantly introducing new mechanics (sometimes as many as three in a single world, when the world only has twelve levels!), but even in the final world and the postgame world, where you start getting more consistently-difficult puzzles, there will be several really easy levels in the mix despite next-to-nothing new being introduced. It comes across as padding, especially since each postgame level actually has two to four stages in a row (with the first levels in the set always being really easy), and if you stop playing before solving them all, you have to start over from the first level in the set. It’s the same problem Cyadonia has, stitching blatantly-separate sections together to make it seem like the game is longer/harder than it really is.

Actually, it might be slightly worse since I’m pretty sure several postgame levels are just duplicates of main game puzzles (or if they aren’t, they’re extremely similar).

That said, I should stress that the game does have some genuinely challenging puzzles, all the while being entirely fair, only using mechanics you’ve been taught, and doing an okay job of teaching new mechanics through level design in the easier puzzles. Whenever I got really, truly stumped, I could simply stop playing and mull over the level in my head, since the mechanics are reliable enough to solve the levels that way. The closest it gets to an exception is 5-13, as that level is built around a mechanic introduced just two levels before, yet would still be really hard even if the game had properly built up to it in difficulty.

Oh, I should probably also mention that the game does a very poor job of indicating that the postgame levels even exist to begin with. When you beat the final world, the credits roll, and you’re booted back to the title screen. The only way you’d know the postgame world exists to begin with is if you loaded your save file and moved your cursor past the final world, and the only reason I thought to do that was because each level tells you how many moves you took to beat it, yet never displays a target move limit, and I wanted to see if beating the game unlocked one (it doesn’t).

Highly recommended.