Okay, I’m gonna go ahead and call it: the “first person puzzle” genre is inherently inferior to 2D puzzles because, by nature of the first-person camera, info is always hidden from the player; you can’t see the whole arena at once or even pan the camera around it like in Toki Tori 1. No more first person puzzle games for me.

This is a first person puzzle game. Move yourself with left stick, aim/move camera with right stick, grab/use item with A, run with RB.

It starts off boring, which is one thing since puzzle games need to introduce their mechanics before getting difficult, but all it does is spin its wheels until it introduces its next mechanic, and then the biggest challenge is figuring out that’s what it’s doing. First, it introduces drones (they explode when you get close), turrets, and jammers, so you think “oh, I use the jammers to disable the turrets and bombs,” but then suddenly there’s a couple turrets that have to be disabled by hitting a switch, and those switches only appear twice in the first 7 worlds. There are also stairs that lead to elevated platforms, and the game won’t let you pick up an item from a lower floor while you’re standing on an upper floor…except for this one level in world 3 where part of the lower floor is ever-so-slightly raised from the rest of the ground, and if you put the item there, you CAN pick it up from the higher platform! Then you get to world 4, which introduces a new item…except it’s transparent. You have to backtrack to the hub and find a pillar to unlock the new gimmick so you can progress (same thing with world 5’s gimmick). It also doesn’t take much longer to run into yet another example where info is obscured from the player: you start with a red-laser-node, then have 2 red locks and 2 blue locks that run in a circle (with the blue-laser-node around the half-way point), leading back to the entrance room where a blue lock blocks the goal. Thing is, locks are unlocked with lasers, and you have to use a connecter to connect the node to the lock, but you can’t cross multiple lasers without disabling them. Plus, in this level, there aren’t enough laser connectors to complete the circle (and of course, you can’t just retrace your steps with the blue laser because then it’d cross the red laser), so you walk back while thinking you’d come across something in another level that’d tell you the solution…except when you get back to the entrance room, you see a dead-end staircase in the corner, behind where you’d be looking when you first walk into the level, and you instantly realize “oh, I can just put a connecter up there and bring the blue laser under it.” If I’m stumped on a puzzle, I want it to be because I’m missing something on my own, not because the game is making me miss something. Despite this, I kept going and encountered another example in world 5: for the level with the red piece, there’s a jammable gate in the distance, and if you aren’t looking at it when the drone hits the gate (which creates a shockwave), you’d never know it’s there because it’s in the distance (guarded by some turrets) and behind a wall. Also, the first level in world 5 (that I played) had just one connecter and a box to put it on, and the whole level was just a hidden-object game, with you looking around for where there’s both a hole to the laser-node and a hole to the gate so you can connect both of them. Then, the game continues to spin its wheels (because when it isn’t cheap, it’s boring) except this one level where once again, you have to exploit elevation differences with the laser-connecters and the nodes/gates to let the lasers cross paths without colliding with each other.

Then, when you finally beat all 7 kinda-boring worlds, you unlock the tower, so I went in, solved the first level, then hit a roadblock saying I hadn’t beaten enough levels. Wait, what? So I went back down, and that’s when I saw that the game, once again, had placed stuff outside the camera’s view: in this case, two more sets of worlds. So I went to the B set, entered world 1 of set B, then made it to the north level (I started counterclockwise, so this was the third level I played). I was stumped for a bit, until I accidentally figured out you could place blocks on top of drones, and that was the whole puzzle. Another gimmick! And to add insult to injury, the upper-right level (which I started afterward) already had the box on the drone from the start. Why have the levels selectable in the first place if the gimmicks are introduced in one and utilized in another?

So that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, and I finally decided I had enough. Sure, I’d only made it probably 1/4th through the game, but it had already shown me enough problems besides being boring to make me want to quit. Not recommended.