Hey, thanks for the comment. I'm sorry you're finding them frustrating.
Are you having trouble with the interfaces (i.e. figuring out how to submit or manipulate a puzzle) or with actually solving the puzzles themselves?
The puzzles all involve a bit of trial and error -- figuring out how they work was intentionally part of the puzzle design. But I'm not against adding more explicit hints or some sort of in-game guide for easy mode.
I just want to know *what the end result should be*. That is not even slightly clear. I had to read the walkthrough for the door puzzle on easy mode, and *still* was incredibly confused what to click to accomplish that because 90% of the interface is wholly irrelevant. There is just way, way, way too much random noise.
I haven't tried it, but almost feel it may be easier on hard mode because, presumably, more of it is relevant and not just noise.
Thanks; that's useful feedback.
Would it help if the first door puzzle gave some more explicit tutorial, complete with pictures?
Something like "It looks like I can click circles to change their colors, and clicking the big blue button here <show arrow> attempts to submit the puzzle. This bottom section <arrow> looks like a button that might appear once I have it correct. It looks like the background color tells me what color a space needs to be.
That should hopefully carry through pretty well to the other door puzzles, and hopefully the non-door puzzle interfaces are straightforward (even if the method for solving them isn't).
I tried the door puzzles (I've seen two so far) on Hard and it makes *perfect* sense -- but only because I already know what the blue button does at the top. I also now realize I did the door puzzle completely wrong on Easy, and yet it still worked, so... that's probably a bug.
I still have zero comprehension of the other puzzle.
There are no bugs as far as I'm aware... not every space is meaningful for the solution, so you can freely change spaces that are not impacted by symbols.
Does a tutorial like this help with the initial UI hurdle? https://twitter.com/bobcgames/status/1376542769376792581
Honestly, the figuring out the interfaces (and what you're supposed to do) is also supposed to be part of the puzzles, because you were just thrown into an alien spaceship for a species you'd never met before... but I want easy mode to provide whatever help people feel is necessary to complete the game.
(However, completing non-door puzzles is not necessary to complete the game, so I'm less inclined to provide tons of in-game help on those.)
"you can freely change spaces that are not impacted by symbols"
That was the major confusion. There's no reason for that to be the case. It's completely ludicrous to assume you're straight up given the answers on the puzzle itself without needing to look anywhere else, by looking at which circles have symbols on them. When I first looked at the puzzle, it looked like Minesweeper to me, because I'm definitely not going to assume it's not a puzzle.
I guess the problem is not that it's too difficult, but that it's way, way, way too easy, to the point that my instinct is to majorly overthink it, and the only difficult part is figuring out the interface.
Honestly, if you want my suggestion for what the tutorial should say, it should just say "I need to figure out how this panel interface works." That immediately tells me that's the entire puzzle.
