• Detonation
  

  32 minutes playtime

  9 of 16 achievements

Top-down grid movement, but enemies move in real time (not turn-based). All you can do is move, so you have to watch the enemies to learn their pattern in order to avoid them. Besides that, you activate computer monitors to shut off a barrier somewhere, so there’s a bit of backtracking. You have one-hit deaths, and dying sends you back to the first screen, but there are only 9 or 10 screens in the game (and the barriers you disabled stay disabled), so it’s not too annoying. There are also some optional stars you can collect (they don’t do anything except slightly change the “ending” and give you an achievement), but they can be a bit annoying since some are hidden past fake walls.

It’s like Pitcher and the Whale: not bad, there just isn’t much to it.

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Since that game didn’t have much content, I decided to wait until I beat the next game in my backlog to make a post, and oh boy, did this game have more content:

• Cyadonia
  

  47 hours playtime

  no achievements

Ice-sliding Puzzle game. Once again, all you can do is move in the four cardinal directions, except in this game, you keep moving until you collide with another object (and there’s no controller support). The game is divided into nine “packs” which each contain 50 levels, and each level has a turn limit; beat the level in the turn limit, and you get three stars; get 50 stars in the pack to unlock its 49th level and 125 stars to unlock its 50th level (all other levels in each pack are unlocked from the start). The first two packs are “How to Play” packs, which include tutorials and explanations for the game’s various mechanics. For the most part, the game does a pretty good job of making everything clear, but the switches always involve trial-and-error since you’ll never know what they do until after you hit them (Jade 23 is the worst level since it’s nothing but switches toggling other switches into and out of existence).

Each pack more-or-less has its own difficulty curve. On one hand, this means you’ll start encountering tricky puzzles as early as the How to Play packs (assuming you’re trying to get three stars on every level); on the other hand, this means you’ll have to deal with a bunch of super-easy levels at the beginning of the next few packs, even though they’re not teaching you anything new. The packs themselves are supposed to be in order of difficulty, but I found the Ruby Pack to be easier than the pack before it. The sheer number of easy levels makes it seem like the dev was just trying to pad out the game, and cutting out most of them would benefit the end product.

Unfortunately, even when the puzzles themselves are challenging and fair, the game manages to have problems. Notably, the controls can be unresponsive: if you’re holding one arrow key and you push a different arrow key, you won’t move, even if you’re at a standstill. This makes it very easy to move in the wrong direction by accident, often costing you a move and preventing you from getting three stars. The game does have an undo mechanic, but it costs moves to use, so if you’re trying to get three stars and you mess up, you have to reset the entire puzzle.

Exacerbating this issue is the fact that levels can be absolutely bloated, having a turn limit over 100 or even 200 (Gold 48’s turn limit is 402!!!). The game is super blatant about this, too; there are several levels that are clearly divided into sections, where it’s obvious that once you enter one area, you won’t be able to go back, nor is it possible to bring objects from one segment to another. In other words, they’re just a bunch of tiny levels stitched together into one massive level, so when you reach the end and realize you missed the turn limit by one move, you’ll have to reexamine each section to try to find where you’re messing up. It’s more tedious than fun. I normally consider myself pro-turn-limits, but this game helped me understand why others don’t like them. Seriously, there are only one or two of those sectioned levels where part of the solution involves bringing an object from one quadrant to another; the only other reason to have sections combined like that is more padding.

Oh, but it gets even more frustrating when you finally start encountering levels that are challenging on their own merits instead of solely because of the turn limit. You’d think this is where the undo mechanic would be useful, but no: you can only undo your previous two moves, and that’s it. Again, that’s 2 out of 100 or 200 or even 300+, and if you need more than that, you have to reset the entire puzzle. You’re honestly better off just taking a screenshot and moving the sprites around in Paint.net than you are trying to solve the puzzles in the game itself. Sutte Hakkun also has some lengthy puzzles, and you could even argue that some of them are divided into two or three sections (not four, not nine, not twelve), but the crucial difference is that Sutte Hakkun has mid-level quick-saves: at any point, you could effectively save-state so if you messed up on the later parts, you didn’t have to redo the earlier parts. Yes, quick-saving costs points, but points were never the focal point of solutions like the turn limits are in this game.

(speaking of Sutte Hakkun, apparently the Satellaview versions have exclusive levels, so I’ll have to remember to play them at some point, too).

And then, on top of all that (or perhaps because of it), it can be quite ambiguous how to get the turn limit in certain levels. I lost count of how many times I’d beat a level one or two moves shy of the limit, then do what I swear is the exact same solution and somehow get all three stars. Emerald 44 and Sapphire 30 are especially irksome because they’re two of those levels that are split into distinct sections, but even if you figure out how to get all the gems with the lowest moves possible per section, you still won’t beat the level’s turn limit because–SOMEHOW–changing the order of which section you complete first results in using fewer moves. I didn’t really solve those levels so much as I stumbled upon the solution with–you guessed it–trial and error.

Because of ALL that, I admit, I broke down and used the in-game solution for eight levels. Seven of those times ended up being entirely my fault, a path I was overlooking somewhere. The eighth, Gold 39, I maintain is another ambiguous one; I’m still not sure how hitting the grey blocks on my way down while pushing the green blocks saves three moves compared to what I was doing. Besides that, I got three stars on every level on my own…except Gold 48. Not only is the turn limit over 400, but it’s another one of those levels that’s blatantly split into four distinct quadrants. I don’t even have the patience to watch and regurgitate the solution, let alone try to figure out where I messed up on my own; I’ll just settle for the two stars I got from my own solution to that level.

Overall, this game is surprisingly hard to recommend. Yes, it’s free, and yes, there are a lot of genuinely challenging puzzles here that don’t deserve to be ignored…but even if you overlook all the padding, there’s still the unresponsive controls, butchered undo mechanic, and bloated level sizes that make the game much more frustrating than it otherwise would be. I can’t even say “just ignore the turn limits” since that’s where most of the challenge is (and a lot of it is genuine, fair challenge). I guess…just know what you’re getting yourself into.

P.S. You may be wondering: what’s your reward for getting all three stars in every level in one pack? The answer: your character changes color…in that pack only. Gotta hand it to the dev; he took an already cheap reward and managed to make it even cheaper.