devonrv

This is a puzzle game, but its “open world” claim is kinda nonsense (apparently that means different things to us). You have a linear hub and access to a few levels, and at the end of each set of levels is the gimmick intro level for the next set; beat the gimmick intro level and the gate to the next area of the linear hub opens. There are set fast travel points along the very linear hub so that if you miss or skip a level, you won’t have to walk all the way back. As for the levels themselves, there are spouts and pipe segments scattered around the level, and you have to move the pipe pieces to connect the spouts. What sets this apart from other Sokoban games is that L-pieces will rotate if you push them from within the corner, effectively mirroring them after two pushes (though this results in the corner being on the other side, so you need to get around if you want to mirror it again). You also have an undo and reset button, and the undo will even undo your resets, which is nice.

Speaking of the gimmick intro levels, they’re very poorly designed. Normally, tutorials are supposed to railroad you into doing the right thing even before you know how it works; that way, you learn the mechanics without being explicitly told what to do. In contrast, while the game does a decent job of teaching you the core mechanics in the first few levels, this game’s gimmick-intro levels set you up for failure, forcing you to restart after your first doomed attempt and making you go “okay, what does the game want me to do now?” No joke, the ONE TIME I looked up a walkthrough for this game was the “easy” magnet pipes’ intro level: yes, you’re shown that the magnet pipes’ will stick to each other if their openings touch, but then you’re stuck with what’s effectively a giant └┐ piece that’s mirrored from how you need it in order to connect the spouts, and you can’t rotate it since you can only move it one unit down (not horizontal) and there are no holes for the other branch to rotate down into. Turns out, contrary to how every other pipe piece in the game works, magnet pipes can still be rotated by their individual segments even after being connected into one giant piece, and you’d only know this in-game if you happened to push on the exact right tile on this massive └┐ piece (an you only get the one unit of movement before the whole thing hits the bottom wall and gets stuck permanently if you pushed in the wrong spot).

The non-introduction levels fare better, though the game still has problems with abandoning gimmicks or even facets of gimmicks. Yeah, the late-game levels will generally take you more time to solve than early-game levels, but that’s because even after the gimmick introduction level, the game often still hasn’t fully taught you how the gimmick works, and once you’ve finally seen all the possibilities, all of a sudden the world is over and you’re at the next gimmick introduction level. The 16-level-long postgame fares better since it isn’t directly introducing anything new, but it still requires the use of mechanics you haven’t used before, like combining the pit gimmick with the rotating tiles gimmick so you end up with an L piece that only has one tile on the ground and the other two in the air.

Oh, and the difficulty curve is pretty wonky, too, and not just because of the hub allowing a stage select; there late-game levels easier than early-game levels, there are “expert” levels easier than “hard” levels (same for “hard” and “normal” ones), and there are even postgame levels (notably the last two) that are easier than certain main-game levels.

Overall, out of all the level-design-based puzzle games I’ve played, this might just be the worst of them. Yeah, there are some genuinely tricky levels, but the near-constant introduction of new stuff combined with how bad the game is at introducing stuff make this game very hard to recommend. It’s maybe worth a playthrough if you already have it, but if you don’t have it, don’t buy it; wait until it’s free or skip it.

P.S. Level 48 makes you push and rotate an L piece behind no-collision foreground objects so you can’t see what you’re doing and just have to memorize the steps you’ve taken.