Recent reviews by sekti

The Golem is an extremely challenging Sokoban-like puzzle game.

It does not introduce any flashy gimmic (no portals, no recursion, no time travel, …) with most of its complexity coming from its core mechanic of pushing objects that change shape when touching + or - blocks. The artstyle and sound design are quite basic, a bit sterile even. If a charming audio-visual experience is important to you, or if you are looking for something relaxing, you may want to give this one a pass.

What you would be missing, however, is impeccable puzzle design. Even though I consider myself a veteran puzzle gamer, I found none of the puzzles easy. Most are quite hard. Some extremely so. Miraculously, the difficulty does not primarily lie in finding intricate sequences of finicky block manipulations. Instead, most puzzles have an elegant solution that requires a unique high-level insight. Whenever you are stuck, and you often will be, you may rest assured that the solution does not involve any unexpected mechanics, that it resonates with the level title and subtitle, and that every aspect of the level has its role to play. This allows thinking about a given puzzle in ways that are much more satisfying than tedious trial-and-error you might otherwise be tempted to go through.

I needed a hint for the very last puzzle and am rather proud that it was the only one. I tip my hat to anyone who solves everything on their own.

I have played many puzzle games with a time travel mechanic by now, but induction felt fresh nonetheless. In the beginning I stumbled upon solutions of some of the early levels without really understanding them, which was unsatisfying, but I got the hang of it eventually and I had a great time with the later levels. Overall I enjoyed the approach to let the player explore the mechanics rather than explaining them more directly.

Overall a solid puzzle game with a charming minimalist design.

This game is easily in the top 10 of puzzle games I have ever played (and I have played many) and deserving of being in the Puzzle Game Masterpieces bundle together with Baba is You and Steven's Sausage Roll (though it might be the weakest of the three).

While the game does not force you to explore the puzzles in a particular order, you can always look for the footprint symbol on the map which indicates a place where progress can be made with the knowledge you already possess. Given this direction, I was never stuck for any significant amount of time until I reached the “ending”. The puzzles along this main path are cleverly designed: They often benefit from you having a clever idea, but if you don't, then the search space is still restricted enough to allow solving with trial and error, allowing you to stumble upon the solution easily enough. New mechanics are naturally introduced, not by giving you additional powers or introducing new objects. Instead you discover new properties that the logs had all along, which have simply not yet been expressed in the previously encountered levels. While the main puzzles are mostly easy, I still enjoyed solving them. There is something inherently pleasurable about discovering a new island and see the fog lift with a satisfying “whoosh”.

The real challenge starts after the credits roll, when you find yourself back on the map with lots of islands left to discover (each home to a lovely secret). These puzzles can be a bit more open and this can seem frustrating at first. However, you will find that the designers have left, with a few exceptions, useful clues that help you focus your attention on one or a few possible approaches to explore. I ended up discovering all secrets without looking for hints. If you love puzzles, I recommend you do the same. I had a wonderful journey.

Take a six sided die with the number 6 pointing up. Now turn the 6 towards you. Now turn it to the right. Now turn it such that the 6 faces up again. You did three rotations by 90°. Is the die in the same position as in the beginning? Well, it shows a 6 like before, but the 6 is rotated (and some other sides face a different way). This simple observation is what's behind the levels of puzzlement, except that the thing that is rotated is the direction of gravity for the little ghosty.

Not a super complicated concept (certainly not new to you if you ever played around with a Rubix Cube), but it is sufficient to keep you busy for the hour (more or less) that it'll take you to finish the 50 levels of this game.

Some levels are straightforward and can be solved by just stumbling around until you collected all the red dots. Others require you to plan ahead a little so you don't end up in a dead end.

Pick it up if you are in the mood for some soft-core puzzling.

When I read that the game is set in an “adult universe” I took this to mean that it features a deep storyline told with multifaceted, original characters, touching on important existential problems.
What I got was a promising setting with an interesting protagonist and beautiful art, but mediocre writing, a story circling around an old feud that I failed to feel invested in, somewhat jumpy responses to my choices, and an ending that leaves me with many open questions. Another playthrough may have answered some of these questions but I have little confidence it would do so convincingly enough to warrant starting another playthrough from scratch. Note that manual saves that would allow reassessing some key moments are not possible.

I will discuss some of my concerns in more detail below, with only minor spoilers, unless otherwise noted.


It's beautiful, it conveys the mood, and there is lots of it. Just look at the trailer: The vibrant colours, the composition, the lighting. It all fits.


Sadly my French is not good enough, so I had to make due with the English version. It seems the translation was not done by a native speaker, or at least not a native writer. The different characters all have a similar manner of speaking and little is conveyed through choice of vocabulary, for instance. In a few places the wording sounded questionable in my ears, and with the exception of the poetic retelling of Daphné's dreams, descriptions remain purely functional.


The game responds to your choices. However, there is not always a logical causal relationship between the choice and the consequence (1) and some sequences of choices sum up to an overall implausible dialogue (2).

(1) Choosing certain dialog options influences Daphné's alignment in a two-dimensional personality space. Between rationalism (globe) and mysticism (star) on one hand and empathy (sun) and self-centredness (moon) on the other. This alignment, in turn, affects the events of the game (as well as Daphné's fashion choices).
This sounds alright on paper but in practice this means that advertising a particular metaphysical opinion in one part of the game (e.g. witchcraft may exist) makes you be fail at some other challenge (e.g. teach at the local school) with no direct causal link. The indirect causal link via the personality wheel was not apparent to me at the time making such consequences feel oddly dissociated from the plot.
(2) [Spoilers ahead!] I had one conversation with one of the possible “romance options” that went from breakup talk “You've changed, Daphné. I don't recognize you anymore.” over “Things will have to change, and change drastically” to “Daphné Delatour, will you marry me?” in one conversation of hardly a minute. I assume this almost bipolar mood swing is a consequence of the dialogue having more ways of playing out than the developers had the resources to polish.

I would have preferred a more linear plot line with the freed resources invested in making each possible variation more consistent.


The premise of the story is promising. It may sound unoriginal that we get to know yet another protagonist that leaves everything behind to make a fresh start after a personal crisis, but the game managed to find a way to convey the peculiar mixture between anxiety and hope in Daphné's situation and got me genuinely interested in her. The other characters where occasionally quirky but not over the top. Not particularly original but (mostly) no walking tropes either. They would have made for an adequate canvas to tell a rich story.


[I'll try to keep it abstract, but there are vague spoilers ahead.]

Unless my play through omitted the Grand Conclusion That Explains It All, it's about a rich and powerful evil guy doing evil things to obtain more power (and no ulterior motive). To this end he needs access to the mysterious MacGuffin-location in the possession of the protagonist. With the power of kindness the protagonist manages to unite the people against the evildoer (who they were too afraid to confront alone) and even his close associates realise in the end, that they were deceived.

While there were some hints to suggest that the evil guy is, in fact, only part-evil, that there is more than meets the eye, or that he may be willing to settle the conflict, these aspects remained largely abstract. I failed to see any real ethical dilemma or a serious conflict of interest so if it wasn't for the guy being evil for no reason, everyone could just have been on their merry ways.

This shallowness is, in my eyes, the biggest weakness of the game. There just was nothing it had to say.


I'm not a big visual novel player, and if you are, we may not share the same opinion on what makes a great game.
What I can say with confidence is that, if you are just looking for a casual game with a good story regardless of genre, there is much better stuff out there (“To the Moon“ and “Life is Strange“ to name two popular ones). And if you are interested in a visual novel featuring rich and meaningful character customisation options, then “Long Live the Queen“ does a much better job at it.

This game did neither of the two convincingly which left me with little but pretty pictures to look at.

It's pretty okay. Not great, but okay.
The puzzles are easy. Not trivial, but easy.

If there was a “meh” in between thumbs up and thumbs down, it would get that from me.

Took me around 90 minutes to complete, didn't feel like a waste of time, but didn't feel particularly original either. “Rush” by two tribes have very similar mechanics but make more out of them. But, I admit, cubes are not as cute as robots.

I love puzzle games, but this game hardly qualifies as one, unless you find it puzzling if round things go into round holes while square things go into square holes.

This game is about thoroughly exploring rooms, and matching the items you find with the gaps where items are needed. It is about remembering that there was a three digit number somewhere when you encounter a three digit number lock. It is about finding that easy to miss clue on the side of the desk. It is also about marveling at odd contraptions that magically spring to life if you flip a switch or turn a key. It is about satisfying "click" and "katchunk" sounds when you do the right thing. If that is for you, go for it.

It wasn't for me.

I would have hoped for this puzzle game to be a bit more... puzzly. Most puzzle games that I enjoy require some kind of insight to proceed, or at least, are designed such that strategic thinking is superior to trial and error. You apply logic, derive a pattern and act on it.

This game on the other hand does not reward thinking much. The best strategy seems to be: Find pieces that fit the border (usually this will yield a unique partial solution) and go from there (usually there is a unique way to do so). This took me through the hundred levels in roughly six hours with little cause to reconsider my strategy. It's not super boring (you can listen to music or podcasts in the background) but does not provide an interesting challenge either.

I would have hoped for more clever puzzles. There are topological and graph theoretic insights that levels could be built upon, such as:

• Any cut through the level crosses an even number of lines (of each colour).
• The curvature of each loop must sum up to a multiple of 360°.
• If there are crossings between red and blue lines, then this number of crossings must be even.
• The number of times line segments connect to the left end of a hexagon equals the number of times that a connects to the right (for each colour. the same for the other two directions).

I think it would have been possible to build new mechanics and levels around those mechanics that encourage and reward thinking about these things. Sadly, the existing levels are designed such that considerations of this kind are either useless or more tedious than just applying trial and error.

There are puzzle games out there that convey interesting logical insights and reward the application of them, making the player feel smart when solving a challenge. This is not one of these games.