I wanna start by saying I had fun with the game :). I like the core of going through these puzzles seeing the setting, getting lore, dialogue, etc. My favorite element was the platform/face cube manipulation. It's unique and fun! I also looked through your twitter and love your art style <3 As far as the game, I did have some issues.
Character Movement:
The momentum, jump height- the physics all feel nice and I was able to get pretty good. Even to the point of pulling off some naughty stuff in some puzzles! (Ill get to that) However I had a couple qualms.
The mid-air flip. Its a little jarring. Its something I can tell you've put some effort into, but I certainly can't say it *helped* with platforming. It felt kinda ambiguous where my collision box was sometimes. This game is half puzzle, half (relatively) skill-based platforming, so understanding the character's placement has some importance.
Next is the wall-jumping. Despite the character having full air-control, and it being very easy to reattach to the same wall you jumped from, you can't wall-jump again. I totally get limiting the character movement for the sake of puzzles, but this feels... off. This was most apparent when- Ok I gotta paint this picture through text so bear with me:
Im on a far-left wall. I wall-jump off over to a pillar in the middle of the room, I make it over the top of it, and reverse to land on the left side of the pillar, aaand of course I still can't wall jump. It feels unintuitive, and a little hard-limiting on a set of movements that are otherwise very free-form.
I have a suggestion, though. Instead of hard limiting the wall jumps, instead you could give the character less air control after a wall-jump. That would naturally prevent being able climb up a wall indefinitely. You could either give the player a higher base level of "air-friction" after a wall-jump, or maybe prevent movement all together for a set time after wall jump. It would almost behave like a Celeste-style dash in that case. Regardless of what you do, I just hope it feels more natural.
Dialogue:
The only thing I'll say about the writing is, maybe it's just not for me. I'd be willing to accept that. However, I feel the interface could use a little work.
I appreciate the effort to prevent dialougue from halting gameplay. However, the dynamic moving box is jarring. It's not practical to engage with dialogue while you're trying to play. I would always just stop moving to read. In fact, once the dialogue is up, I have incentive to stop and read to get the moving box off the screen. Of course, it goes away when you jump, as well as flying to each side of you when changing directions/stopping leaving it in a weird place between trying to be seamless with gameplay, and not making it. It looks neat, and again it looks like you went through some effort to implement, but I'd prefer a simple static placement. It would be a lot easier to read on the fly.
Puzzles:
Im not a puzzle designer so I can't give you too much great feedback here, but I'll do my best. Maybe take this section with a grain of salt. They puzzles feel a little... Chaotic? Like their designs need a little more time in the oven. For example the puzzle right after the intro to powered blocks: You have to move the normal block above the powered and use the powered to push it upwards where it then.. moves right for some reason? Is there some indication that was gonna happen? I couldn't tell.
There were a few that I didn't really know if I had found the solution or cheesed it. The ability to move the blocks before they've stopped is rife for cheese, and you may wanna consider removing that feature, or making a special block specifically for that. Now I just wanna say, I had fun cheesing, and it's up to you wether or not you want your game to allow for that, Im just pointing it out. If Im not completely wrong, Im *pretty sure* there's a lot of emphasis on momentum in the puzzles. (that is if I wasn't just accidentally cheesing) This makes sense because this is a puzzle-platformer. But it comes back to my idea of chaotic puzzles. It can feel kind of imprecise flinging yourself around haphazardly, and it has some contrast to the thinking elements. It's just the natural predicament of a game that has puzzles and action.
On my first playthrough I flung myself through half of the puzzles, abusing the freedom to move blocks however I want, along with the momentum. On my second, I tried to actually do what was intended, and sometimes didn't really know if my "cheese" was the intention or not. Here was my meta: Id ride a cube upwards, then jump off, getting the perfect momentum to make it to the target without hitting spikes at the top. On the last puzzle I was so stumped, I put the spike cube into the left-hand activator, and jumped in and out of the right one avoiding the spikes, easing the block over until the rising platform came out, and I had to jump really early to get the perfect momentum into the hole. Was that intentional?
In general I think this game has done the marriage between puzzle and action in a pretty decent way. You don't see a lot of games trying this for the problems I've already mentioned, so I gotta give you kudos for this game working that on some level.
Minor Gripes
- Not a fan of the post-processing effects
- Menu is full of slow animations
- Quit button doesn't have a confirmation
Glitches:
- Occasionally the momentum wouldn't be carried over to my jump on a moving cube
- If you're wall-hanging on a cube, and you start to move it up, if you make it to the top of it and are holding jump, you don't die (there are also a few other instances where spike cubes didn't kill me but I couldn't see a pattern why)
I think you've got some good ingredients here! In practice they feel a little scattered. Dialogue is mostly fluff, puzzles are a little chaotic. But I can see the potential in here, and the care you've put into it. Congrats on making it this far, Ill be watching how the game progresses :)