I probably should have taken a moment to read the description before playing; I took the skewers(?) to be matches at first and had to do some insane rationalising to try and justify how they behaved.
The length is nice and manages to pack some really cute puzzles (there were a couple that felt like repeats to me but it might just be that I bumbled through them and missed the point).
I'm now feeling a bit unsettled and will probably be thinking about this for a little while. It does just enough that I do and don't want to know more at the same time.
I just read The City & the City a couple of months ago, and I think I've seen you mention Miéville before, so I couldn't help but think of it, even if only the basic conceit is common between the two.
I'm awful at vanilla Tetris so it took me a little while to figure out that bad tetrising wasn't why I was doing so poorly. I'm still not doing well but once I got past that hang-up and forced myself to play it properly, I got to see all sorts of cool little details. I thought the most striking feature of bakeshoppe was how economical (? feels too highfalutin for what I mean) with the controls and it's so much more potent here.
Just an aside, are there any lose conditions besides starving, getting crushed and stacking too high? I lost one time without any of those happening so I was a bit confused.
I'm stuck on 20 at the moment and haven't attempted 21 so I'll be spending a bit more time with it, but I really enjoyed this. 17 and 19 especially were a joy to figure out, I only got them once I slowed down and actually considered all the ideas I had been dismissing and I like when that happens. Cheers :)
(I think I'll just edit this comment as you complete each entry)
1 PARRY
The concept is great of course and I appreciated how you tuned the level design for comic effect. What really interested me though were the some of the ripples which you introduced.
The main thing is that I felt I had to consciously change how I play this sort of game. I found early on that parrying felt inconsistent, but this was because I was focusing all my attention on enemies and so was expecting my sword to behave the way I wanted without actually thinking about what I should do to make that happen.
Allowing rockets to exist offscreen seems like it might have been a simple decision but I was surprised by the degree to which it changed the experience. Forcing planning movement as opposed to just dodging whatever's on the screen feels consistent with the point above about awareness of input.
It seemed like a rocket would stop seeking you once its launcher had been destroyed but I wasn't sure. I liked how the behaviour looked, whatever it was.
I could see the possibility for lots cool maneuvers (e.g. jumping into the corner of a tile to gain more vertical velocity than you would from running up its curve), though I was not skilled enough to pull them off when I was trying. I couldn't even get the point of the ^, so maybe I should focus on training the fundamentals. I would love to see what a experienced playthrough/speedrun of this looks like!
It felt pretty unique in that I can't remember a game I've played that actually felt like it was about the physics rather than being about a ruleset with physics as noise. I guess the common practice in physics puzzlers and platformers is to discretise things for the sake of the designers and players and this is in brazen ignorance of that. Maybe that's a ridiculous thing to say, but I've gotten a similar vibe from some of your other stuff and I feel like I understand them a bit better having played this.
