Recent reviews by its osla

The gameplay equivalent of listening to white noise at an unreasonable volume. Looking for patterns in the tile of a bathroom floor. Pressing a button that's labeled "give dopamine" but it was never wired up to do anything but you're still pressing it. A joke with no punchline.

The gameplay is entirely built around running away, avoiding enemies, etcetera - and that's fine, and being difficult is fine - but it's janky as hell, with inconsistent collision detection, badly telegraphed danger, a huge amount of trial and error. All the polish of a deliberately frustrating flash game from 2009 - and the repetitive, plink-plonky background music to match. God, it even does the thing where it doesn't loop correctly and so there's a jarring cut-out once a minute while the mp3 restarts. I'm truly back in high school.

That could all be forgiven if the set dressing were nice. But changing into a latex anthro is considered a game-over state. And, like, that's what we're here for, I thought? "Changed?" more like. "Don't change." more like. "Remain a twink." That is what the game should be called. "Remain a normal human twink."

I've been wandering in the desert for weeks being hounded by hordes of feral hogs. I have four arms and three heads and I can equip different sets of gloves to my upper arms and my lower arms. That's crazy, man.

"Like the witness," yes, to an extent, but far from derivative; the puzzles have their own feel, and the island has its own identity. The 2d perspective and simple artstyle allow for a lot of unique tricks that wouldn't have been practical in a 3d environment. Full of "aha!" moments, and even the more straightforward puzzles are satisfying step-by-step deductions.

Not a lot of puzzlers as carefully-crafted and focused as this one. Worth every penny.

Positively hypnotic. A great puzzler in the vein of Stephen's Sausage Roll and The Witness in that "permuting through every possible consequence of a simple set of rules" sort of way, but (to me, anyway) significantly less difficult; the puzzles required to get the ending are all very self-contained and rarely involve thinking about anything outside their own islands.

There's a good few moments of metroidvania-ish "Oh, now I understand how the world map links together!" but considering the world map is made of dozens of bite-size tiny puzzle islands with little in the way of obvious overall organization, this knowledge isn't really useful; just the designers showing off, I guess. But it's still impressive how the whole thing fits together!

A game that deserves to be at least twice as long as it is, barely scratching the surface of what its mechanics are capable of - but joyously clever while it lasts all the same. Minor polish issues (no confirmation prompt on 'New Game' that automatically deletes progress, sometimes solutions that look correct aren't accepted for unclear reasons) but nothing that ruins the experience. Worth the price. Great music, too.

A very tight, very demanding puzzle-ish game that uses a simple, easily learnable set of mechanics to force you to make mind-destroyingly difficult decisions; getting near-perfect completions of most of the later floors requires you to think five steps ahead, but you don't have to be anywhere near perfect to progress to the next stage, which is a pretty lovely nugget of design. You gain items and health for doing earlier floors better, so performance on early floors affects your ability on later ones, and even when you can't figure out the perfect solution you're always pressured to do as well as you possibly can.

The randomly generated levels will occasionally throw you a floor you can wipe in one try out of instinct, and occasionally something that has you completely stuck, which can be demoralizing near the end of a good run. There's also a timer on each level, which I guess is there to make sure you can't be TOO cautious, but getting wrecked by a ghost when you're 3/4ths of the way through a tricky level can feel frustrating all the same. Despite these gripes, each individual puzzle is still a joy to solve. I don't know if I'll ever be able to 100% this game, but I find that just loading it up and playing a few floors is satisfying even when I don't get very far. I absolutely got the Tetris Effect going the first night I bought this, when I played it for an hour or so before bed.

Unparallelled worldbuilding, unparallelled puzzle design, unparallelled amounts of polish in places where you really wouldn't expect there to be polish. The puzzles unfold in that beautiful way that's always only the tiniest step ahead of you, tickling your cranium. The pretty sights and sounds you're seeing are surprising and unique, which is good, but when you're solving these puzzles you have moments when you realize you just thought of something exciting and unique, which is truly marvelous.

Downsides: There are a few bugs and stability issues (though the game autosaves often enough it was never very frustrating). It's something to note, and it's disappointing, but it's not a deal-breaker. And, yes, like everyone else, I wish it were fifty hours long. Oh, well. It's certainly worth the twenty bucks - you can easily see the love and devotion that Brendon Chung put into every tiny detail over the long years this game was in development.

A very tight, well-designed, well-concieved, polished platformer firmly in the vein of N and Super Meat Boy and Dustforce and all that good stuff. There's just enough new mechanics here to set it apart - the polarity-swapping thing lends itself to some very cool platforming setups late in the game, and lends itself to a very nice jump-swap-jump-swap rhythm. Controls are tight and fluid in that special way that just feels good. The excellent sound design and art all hits this very Meatboy-ish line of being quirky enough to have a distinct personality but not so much that it gets on your nerves.

My only gripes are:

- It's not lacking in value for money, but it feels like a disservice to such a well-designed game that some of the coolest mechanics are only used in the very last area. Maybe I'm just neurotic, but I would've liked the difficulty curve to be a bit steeper, and perhaps another area or two to really milk every last drop of potential.

- The final boss requires a skillset that has little to do with everything you've learned up to that point. A bit of an unsatisfying mess, but mercifully short.

Anyway, I flew through this the day it came out, and it kept me pretty engaged the whole time. It doesn't quite match its influences in eliciting that twitchy platformer trance state of an afternoon of endless retries, but it does carve a nice little niche for itself where it puts on a solid effort.

What right does this game have to call itself "meditative?" I certainly don't feel relaxed. I feel like my mind is strangling itself with a wire. The learning curve is not so much steep as it is endless. I have been playing for only about three hours and I feel like a two-year-old desperately fighting against his own undeveloped motor skills. My thumbs hurt. My hands hurt.

Anyway, you should buy this game.