Recent reviews by mvandevander

Best designed puzzle platformer since Braid. Skip the demo though, as it gives a bad impression of the actual game.

Much less annoying that most games in the genre. Although there are quite a lot of maze-y puzzles, most of the mainline is not so bad. Also there's a really fun endgame puzzle after you get through the mainline stuff.

Surprisingly quite good level design. The game does have some presentation issues. Some quick animations would help sell a lot of the things in the game. I also found some of the metaphors hard to follow, swamp water kills you but regular water doesn't? Might make more sense if the swamp water was magma or fire or something.

EDIT: The following is no longer true, as the developer has addressed this complaint and restarts are now undo-able.

The biggest complaint I had with the game as it currently is, is that restarting is not undo-able. The game seems to just unwind the undo stack completely when you press reset, but the correct implementation is to add the initial state of the puzzle as a new state to the end of the undo stack. This is a pretty standard expectation for the genre at this point.

It's possible there's some technical reason later on that restarts are not undo-able, but I didn't get far enough to see such a thing, and lost progress a few times because I just wanted to examine the initial state of the puzzle again.

Very interesting and unique blend of genres....and CHESS! There's essentially two entire games in this one game, with the simulation builder part and the dungeon crawler part.

For now I'd say the main thing the game needs before release is some balancing. It's way too hard to keep pieces from starving to death. And it's also fiddly and annoying manually moving lv1 pawns to get them to do anything, even when your town has gotten to lv5. I would suggest perhaps having a town level bonus at a certain point that gives lv1 pieces auto-movement abilities. At least lv2!

Additionally I think it would be good to be able to bail out early on a dungeon, as going through 4 floors in a row is very time consuming, and part of the benefit of this game's design is that if you get bored with the simulation aspect, you can do some dungeon delving for a while. I'd suggest allowing the player to bail out when they clear a floor. Perhaps there can be some penalty there, though I'm not certain what (and of course you shouldn't be able to revisit the dungeon again in the same day)

Additionally the piece selection takes a bit to get used to, because you have to click the tile below the piece instead of the piece itself. This also seems to cause a bug in the dungeon in the demo where you cannot select the flying key by clicking because it is over a bottomless pit. You can work around this by picking it from the party bar at the bottom of the screen, but still something worth noting.

I'm still fairly early, but so far the game is well paced and surprising. Each area unlocks the next area without requiring 100% completion, which means that you can move on to a new idea pretty quickly if you're bored, or if you want more then there's more.

I'm pretty early on, but so far I like it. It is relatively "puzzle-lite", so if you're looking for super hard puzzles then maybe you'll be disappointed. But it's quite charming, has lovely art and music, and it definitely leans fully into the movement gimmick.

(UPDATE after a few more hours:) I'd say that I still stand by my earlier statements. I do think it gets a bit trickier as it goes on, but the game is still mostly focused on keeping you in a flow state rather than having you get stuck on a puzzle for 30 minutes. I think some of the story is a bit over-written, but there are occasional parts where I did find it humorous. It's also fairly lightweight in the story and you can just tap through it if you really don't like it and just look at the quest log for what to do next.

I mean, at the end of the day, it's Braid. It's the classic puzzle game, just spiffed up for more modern displays. The graphics look great at 4k, and high refresh rates are supported (though I did notice a couple small visual bugs at 144hz, though hopefully this will get patched quickly EDIT: Seems patched to me already!). If you haven't played Braid, then there's no better opportunity than now, and I can see no good reason to prefer the original release to this version (you can swap to the old art and sound with a single button press, if you really like). I love Braid very deeply, and it's not an exaggeration to say that this game changed the course of my life significantly. I probably would not have seriously pursued game development without having played it.

For those who already played Braid, it's a great way to revisit a game that you love, but the real draw here I think is the developer commentary. If you have any interest whatsoever in the art and design of video games (and especially if you are intent on becoming a game designer yourself) then there is a lot to learn from studying Braid, and the commentary will point out many interesting aspects that might not be immediately apparent. Braid is a fairly short game, but it is packed with details and ideas to consider.

I've played a lot less of this than many of the other reviews here, but I felt like I'd played enough to offer some useful thoughts on the game. Lingo is a good game that has a lot of major caveats. The first couple hours of the game are extremely rough and I would not be surprised if many players bounce off the game due to the level of intransparency about what the core mechanics even are.

In fact, I will provide a hint that will make those first couple hours much smoother (spoilered, but I don't think it's much of a spoiler and I highly suggest you read it) The color of puzzles, as well as their height relative to your eye level, both affect the way in which the mechanics work..

The non-euclidean "antichamber style" world design is irritating and does not add much to this game, imo. [sttrike]There's also an annoying hedge maze in the game that you do at least have to walk through once. The game runs very poorly because the Godot engine is not very optimized for making large worlds like this one.[/strike] Both of these issues have since been addressed in patches. I would say the hedge maze may have been over-corrected, but the performance improvements are well and truly a game changer.

With all that said, it is a game that has some very interesting ideas in it that I have not seen before, and that makes it worth looking it in my estimation.

Cute game with fun puzzles that doesn't overstay its welcome.

I enjoyed the little story elements, and many small details about how the game was implemented.

Good game.

There are two main things about Dis Pontibus that are notable. The first is that the entire game is procedurally generated, including the puzzles. And the second is that the puzzles are surprisingly good considering that. They don't feel generated.

Pros:
Challenging Inventive Puzzles
A Lot of Them
Pleasant although minimal aesthetics
Optional challenges in some puzzles that are even harder

Cons:
Environment is a bit monotonous
No real overarching structure, just a bunch of puzzles to solve
Puzzles aren't obviously grouped into types

If you're into hard-core puzzle solving games like Stephens Sausage Roll or Pipe Push Paradise, this may scratch some of those itches in a different way.