Recent reviews by Demeno

One of the better games in the CosmOS 9 bundle.
It's a short game without almost any pizzazz, but it's a solid honest puzzle exploring an interesting game mechanic the way good puzzles should.

Minor negative - if there's a fullscreen button, I couldn't find it. Would've been nicer to play it in fullscreen.

I don't want to be mean, but I wouldn't recommend playing this game even if you got it for free, it's a waste of time.

* Graphics are kinda okay.
* Audio is okay.
* Narrative is very minimal and clearly taken from Dune.
* Game design makes no sense, there aren't strategic challenges.
* Controls are inconvenient.
* Has some bugs

Game Design:
There are almost no meaningful decisions to make:

* Each building requires a power plant, but power plants can only be connected to a single building, so positioning these power plants is just more tedious clicks, no planning required, it doesn't matter where you place them except for being kinda close to that one building.
* Enemies fly over everything and attack random buildings, there's no planning for that, so the only solution is to try to notice when that happens and quickly place a defensive building (+power plant, of course) next to the enemy - no interesting decision, the only challenge here is to notice when an enemy flies into the screen.
* The lab building increases production by 10%, so at some point it's just effective to keep spamming labs (+power plants, of course) at random positions, it makes absolutely no difference where you put those labs, just place them randomly around the map as fast as you can. (Got the highest possible score this way)
* Goal isn't communicated, what score would be considered a good score?

Controls:
* Clickable elements (buttons / buildings) have no hover effects, so it's hard to know if they're clickable, and to bring the mouse to the right position.
* Building buttons' hit areas are smaller than they seem, the square box isn't clickable, only the inner image.
* Building popup-menus require a click to open, should just open on hover. Or maybe avoid a menu altogether, as it always contains just one option.

Bugs found:
* Building popup-menus don't close if you click on another building, only if you click on empty space - very frustrating.
* You can place buildings while the game is paused.

Summary:
This game feels like a half-polished jam game that somehow got released. The developer should mostly focus on improving the game design and UX for future projects.

As others have mentioned, this game is short, one-seating short.
However, I found this one-seating very enjoyable.

My favorite kind of puzzle game is the one where you go in with 0 explicit explanations and figure everything out by yourself, including the interface & the goal. This game is exactly that kind of game.

While most games have a lot more "content" than novel game mechanics, in IFO it's almost 1:1, basically each level introduces new game mechanics. Therefore, IFO respects your time and gives you as many interesting mechanics to explore in the shortest amount of time, without any fluff. I think that's a positive, not a negative.

While very obviously inspired by The Witness, Understand takes the "figure out the rules" element in another direction by changing the rules in each "level" (level = a group of puzzles) and encouraging the player to experiment by giving per-rule feedback, thereby focusing more on discovering the rules, and to a lesser extent on figuring out their consequences.
This innovative direction works well and constantly provides great "a ha!" moments.

The game also includes some very nice surprises that I won't spoil.

One of the best puzzle games I've played since The Witness, and for a very low price.

Tried it only once.
Played in immersive mode on the Valve Index, was a bit hard to control, and I got some hardcore VR sickness, not for me.

Still, it's a nice proof of concept. Not polished but that is expected from a free game.

This is the first game ever to make me actually want to buy a DLC (Which I don't know exists).

The graphics are beautiful, and gameplay's great, if a little easy at times.
I really like the new deduction mechanic, and the new profiling mechanic.
The cases are interesting and varied, and feel like they naturally belong in a "Sherlock Holmes world".

Figuring out the conclusion of every case is very nice because it makes sure you don't just click around without actually understanding what's going on. Some of the cases are harder than others, sometimes the conclusion is pretty obvious and sometimes it's really hard to figure out, I got it wrong in one of the 6 cases. I like that the possible conclusions keep changing with new evidence.

Would have been more challenging if you had to pick which item to use when you need "an object of interest" instead of the game just giving you the right option. Also would have been more challenging if the game didn't tell you when to use the "Sherlock Talent" and the "Sherlock Imagination" abilities.

The environments are beautiful, would have loved to try this in VR. I spent some of the time just looking around and enjoying the scenery. Voice acting is very nice in my opinion; a historian friend of mine noted that Sherlock's accent didn't sound right, but I had no problem with it.

Overall a very fun experience for me, I enjoy games that make you think, and this is much better than just a regular adventure game. Would love to play many more cases, but the game is definitely worth buying "just" for those 6, every case is more than an hour of very interesting content.

Graphics are so so, gameplay control is so so, but the story, atmosphere and design are top notch! Holds true to the original games, is very interesting, and is challenging in exactly the right amount.