I sunk a lot more time into this game than I was expecting to. I feel like there's a ton depth and complexity to unlock here. But I think my brain is too small to make the connections. Some synergies and strategies seem obvious. Like putting the sun flower at the end of the chain of putting a safe above Charybdis. I discovered by accident that the clock can off set the timing of a chain when I put it near a washing machine but I couldn't figure any practical application of that. I did really enjoy this game but I feel like there's so much I'm missing out on. I appreciate the sandbox mode but I wish the game had a more guided approach in teaching some of the more advanced strategies.

Did also want to add that I really liked all the sprite art, music and animations. The only problem I had visually was that I struggled to move pieces around after placing them. A lot of times I would have to move all the pieces in front of one the one I actually wanted to move.

I like the concept, and I love the way they go “boo” when I lose. I found that funny.

Cognitive-wise, I struggled with the tutorial, because it has a lot of text to read, a lot of information to absorb. To me, it is okay to read one page of tutorial like this one. Once I got to the second, I skimmed. Once I got to the third, I simply skipped it.

I know how this sounds, probably. It might sound like I’m not trying hard enough. Like i have a short attention span and am embracing it, instead of challenging it. These two things might be true. But it is also true that interactive tutorials, short sentences, smaller sections of content between each set of instructions (instead of the whole page) and less information at once is proven to be easier to understand. A lot of information to take in at once is hard when you don’t have the real-life experience of knowing what it all is referring to.

Which is also why players tend to skip to the game itself.

It is a game with a lot of information and rules to take in. So I feel that it is the kind of game that would work better if the tutorial and instructions had more images to go with it and exemplify the concepts. There are some good boardgames with great manuals. The way they explain the rules ensures you can understand it better before playing. But they still take time and effort to read through, of course. There are boardgames I take days to read, because we are trying to learn the information. And still the first time we play is also like an interactive tutorial, because we need the manual to set it up and through playing need to keep checking the rules. So I suppose in a videogame there’s also the question about how long do you want the player to take to read the tutorial? And there’s also the risk of them losing interest / patience / focus as they read through it. What is also harder is that with a digital-only video game I can’t be playing the game and checking the manual at the same time, as we used to be able to when we had CD-ROMS and game boxes with great manual, or as we can do with boardgames.

I am glad that the game isn’t time-sensitive. I was scared it would be, because I thought I wouldn’t know how to play.

VISUALS:

There are a few problems with the visuals. Namely, especially, with the menu to choose a card after I lost the first level. Each card has its color but the text is in red and green and often with very low contrast. It scares me away from reading but now it’s not because of information overload (or at least not only). It’s because it’s physically hard to read.

But it does have some information overload as well, because I failed the first level, and before getting to try again and seeing how it works, I had to choose a card, and didn’t quite understand the sequence and narrative of things.

Although there is a sandbox mode. A sandbox mode is very helpful for cognitive accessibility, and a good complement to the tutorial, to help us learn. So I think I will quit and try again but start with the sandbox.

For now, these are my first impressions. It looks like a great concept and I’m sort of excited to understand it, but i think it has much polish to do to become less daunting cognitive-wise and also readable and usable from a visual accessibility perspective.

This game was amazing, I played for almost a whole hour and had to peel myself away. I spent a long time trying to break the game and make an infinite loop with a crazy, complex circuit... and then it turns out all I needed were two windmills and a couple non-touching receivers! You did a great job designing very different types of ballerinas, and the roguelike shop was a good way of trickling them to the player. I did feel like a chain of receivers was OP; I did spend the first few rounds of one run just buying as many of them as I could, and then ending on two flowerpots. Idk how much the quote increases by the longer you play, but I was doing pretty well with that strat.

Also, having a sandbox was a fantastic decision. A lot of playtime was spent in there getting familiar with the mechanics and trying different circuits I would've been too scared of exploding in the main game. Very well done!