That was a puzzle all right. I liked the simple visuals and the controls were snappy. Also enjoyed the slightly vague button tutorials, wanna do something like that for one of my games now >:)

Having a save system was much appreciated. It sadly didn't help much in the later levels (where I needed it the most) since it didn't save the single-press buttons' states and broke buttons if saved with a box on them. Also would put the save and load buttons further from each other, it's very easy to mispress K instead of L and lose all your progress.  The buttons (at least the reset button) didn't work when I switched to a different language keyboard layout.

Explicitly telling the player that they softlocked themselves was pretty odd? More then once it acted as a straight up hint, and when it didn't, I knew that I softlocked myself without the text anyway. Also the softlock notification didn't disappear upon loading a save.

The levels were extremely hard to parse visually, which is somewhat integral to the mechanic I guess. You could preview the next aberration state with like 30% opacity at all times, not sure it would look good and/or understandable though, just an idea. Buttons could have been different for when they need a box and a single press, that's probably the biggest easily fixable problem. Could have been some portal-style background lines to show which button activates what.

The person below provided very good criticisms which I agree with completely so I'll try to not repeat what they said too much. The mechanic you came up with is pretty elegant and provides plenty of depth, I liked it; I didn't like the levels very much. The way I enjoy puzzles the most is when they have a tiny space with a small amount of possible permutations, focused on a single cool mechanical idea that makes me go "aha!" when I figure it out. This game had me go "oh, finally" when I solved a level. Instead of letting me experience a cool consequence of a mechanic, the game added five layers of complexity on top of it, making me completely overwhelmed, especially with already being fundamentally hard to parse due to the core mechanic. If I was making it, I would try to make every level as small as possible while keeping the singular thing that I find fun about the level. There's a good GDC talk that describes that for a bit. 

The last mechanic with invisible colors is smart and could be nice in theory but it didn't work out well for me in the game; I didn't understand it at all in the introductory level and the last level wasn't satisfying to solve, felt somewhat like a chore to figure out. Also it obviously adds to the problem of levels being hard to visually parse.

This review is very critical but I did play for one and a half hours and beat it so clearly the game did something right! It is clever and made me proud of solving it. I also liked the dog in the end. Great job and good luck with your future games!

Woah. That was crazy. I really enjoyed this game. I read you had sent a message to #jam-general about designing puzzles, and as a guy who loves designing puzzles and playing puzzles I thought I should try it out. This game broke my brain.

I read some people mentioning the steep learning curve and I agree. It's really steep, but I think more than it just being steep, what is happening is that some of these puzzles aren't as difficult as they are intimidating. Here's an example:

This puzzle introduces three new pieces of information to the player:

• Some buttons need to be held down instead of just pressed once.
• Boxes exist, can be pushed around, and are also effected by the chromatic aberration.
• Chromatic aberration can have more than only two different states. (That is: You don't just flip flop between two different positions per object.)

This is a lot of information to spring on the player in one level. In addition this puzzle is essentially two puzzles in one. The first half is the part I've drawn a red box around: The puzzle of moving the box up to the button (including its other half). The second half is the part I've drawn a blue box around: The puzzle of moving one half of the box down to the other button (which requires figuring out which half to keep and which half to move). Keep in mind that you need to do all of this while maneuvering the player character, which already requires some brainpower. So I was at maximum brainpower here.

When I first saw green added into the mix, I considered stopping. But then again, I realized that the level was just intimidating because of the amount of information I had to juggle in my brain. It was three separate puzzles, so I started isolating them in my brain and ignoring parts that didn't matter for each mini-puzzle. I think especially when there are more colors in the mix, having three or even four possible positions for each object becomes incredibly difficult to keep track of. Especially in the final two levels where you don't even know where one of the positions is. Those two levels where the screen would be tinted showing you only where two of the possible positions were were hellish. In the first one, I didn't even realize what was happening so when I saw the green character appear, disappear, and then appear near its target (on accident). I thought it was a bug. So when I got to the final level, I had to figure out through a lot of trial and error that there were hidden positions for each element in each color (which I should've learned in the previous level) and where those positions were. It really felt like the puzzle game equivalent of a dark souls boss.

I'm really happy I powered through and beat the game. The ending was really cute.

I hope this comment isn't overwhelming or too long. But I really liked this game and I think it could be improved significantly if the levels introduced new concepts one at a time, focused on solving one problem at a time, and maybe limited how much information you needed to keep in your head per level. You can make a full game with multiple sets of levels with what you have already. Thank you so much for making this game. I had a great time with it!

I didn't get very far and I think the game crashed when I entered level 3 or 4?
For your first game jam game, this is really solid! The puzzles are actually make you think, which is hard since puzzles are hard to design. Though, in my opinion, I feel like they're a little too hard. The difficulty curve was fast and the mechanics were a little confusing, even after playing them a while. But that's more just on me, I really couldn't understand exactly how things worked. And once I saw that there were MORE colors in the gameplay, I knew I just wouldn't get past this lmao.

Otherwise, the game looks really nice! I love how the CRT filter makes everything look and the concept of playing a fake arcade game. The music is groovy (albeit, maybe a bit too short and samey for the amount of time i spent on the game lmao) Really good job on this game!