There’s a lot of fun and puzzles in this game. It doesn’t hold your hand and lets you try and explore what we’re required to do. It is very exploratory in nature in this way. I think some of the puzzles achieve this better than others.
I think the buttons/question mark puzzle is the hardest of them all, and I wouldn’t say that it is in a good way, because the button you’re meant to click blinks once in “blue”, but then becomes the same color as the others. Also it blinks it a color that become duller, which means it’s harder to notice it when it does. For the first times I tried that puzzle, I didn’t even notice it was blinking, and even the following times, I didn’t always see it, or look at it in time. I think this puzzle could be improved by making it blink in a color that has more contrast instead of less contrast than the other yellow buttons. I also think it should blink a couple more times, if not even the whole time.
I think the traffic lights puzzle could also be improved. Although it has good sound effects to help us notice when the light has changed, you also should keep it in mind that 10% of men and a lower percentage of women are colorblind and can’t distinguish red from green, so as the puzzles require us to spin the traffic light around, they don’t get to see if the light is green or red by the usual standard of “red is the upper one, green is the bottom one”. So I think this could be helped with icons, like the pedestrian icon (walking vs waiting) and/or a continuous sound effect.
The snail puzzle is cute and the watering puzzle is also very cute. They have sound effects, as well, and I think they’re both well achieved, if a bit confusing at the first time we meet the watering puzzle because I didn’t know I could move the pot. But I think it has a good outline that gives you the information that you can interact with it, so it’s like the trial and error.
I think it would be nice to have a couple of “lives” so we can retry the same level we couldn’t do, instead of retrying since the beginning of the game (when we lose). I also think, for accessibility, it would greatly benefit from different levels of how many lives you have, up to infinite maybe, and also speed of the water rising.
This is a great game, if very hectic and hard, it’s really cool and one of the best I’ve played from the jam.