Great game overall, couple of small things to maybe improve

[dmeister]

So after solving a bunch of side puzzles and tasks and then the main goal of reaching Room 46, I feel safe saying this is a great game overall with a couple of minor negatives that could maybe stand a quality of life tweak.

On the plus side, the game is visually gorgeous, the backstory that unfolds as you go is pretty intriguing, and the core gameplay loop of filling out the house is a fun deckbuilder of sorts. A lot of the puzzles are fun to solve as you go, and when you include all the optional side tasks they range from relatively straightforward to fairly complicated.

Overall then a great game, highly recommended! My couple of minor maybe negative notes:

- Not being able to save a game mid-run feels like a design misstep. Runs can take up to an hour to finish so not being able to save your progress if you have to leave unexpectedly is a bit of a small miss in my opinion. You shouldn't have to "call it a day" just to save and quit the game.

- Once you've gotten an item the first time you don't need a full screen pop up explaining what the item does every time you find it. Yes, the Shovel lets me dig dirt, I understand, you don't need to pause the game and show me a screen that tells me that every time I get one. Just put the shovel in my inventory after the first time that description screen is shown, if I want to pull it up again it's very easy to do it from the inventory.

- Lastly, just to comment on the "grind", there are a handful of puzzles that require very specific combinations of rooms, sometimes in specific orders, in your house in a given run in order to solve them. Fortunately these are pretty much optional puzzles, I'm not sure any of them are actually needed to finish the main primary task you're given of reaching Room 46, but towards the end it can feel like you're not making much progress per run because you're hoping to pull certain combos that are hard to get and even tweaking your deck by, say, shifting room rarities takes multiple runs to do as well. So while I do think a couple of these endgame optional tasks are a bit annoying to finish sometimes, at least they're only going to feel really grindy for actual game completionists. If you're like me and are ok solving the main puzzles and the easier to finish side objectives and don't care that much about trying to literally 100% finish everything then I don't think this will be much of an issue. But if you're looking to get EVERYTHING done, it might turn into kind of a slog at points.


So fantastic game, glad I played it. 😄 I really only had the two suggestion bullet points above for my own play that would have improved it slightly for me, and the "grind" thing is mainly just a bullet point explaining why I don't think I'll try and go 100% on this.