Conditions for inclusion:

• -The player character must be consistently a fox; the fox must not be merely a skin or a character optiond
  
  
• -Must have 100% working Steam achievements
  
  
• -Must not be a visual novel

Game #28: Path to Gaea

This is a short, yet excruciatingly slow, turn-based puzzle game. There are 25 levels. It took about 2.5 hours to beat the game, and about 4 to achievement hunt it.

Puzzle design is OK, with a few good moments. The puzzles are based on parity. You can walk between squares on a 2D board. Every time you move, enemies also move. You can kill enemies by moving onto them from the side, but some enemies are invincible because they share the same parity as you, meaning they'll always be on the wrong square and you will never be able to catch them. So you'll have to figure out how to avoid them, or kill them with a projectile attack.

Early levels have spikes which rise and retract on some spaces every time you move, but in an unintutive pattern that you'll have to follow closely to avoid getting impaled. Later levels have some new enemies with more complex behaviors, and some objects you can interact with.

If you're going for 100% completion, the game has some "hidden object" elements to watch out for, which I found to be a nice addition.

The game is decently pretty, which I feel is the main appeal. This feels like a newcomer's first Unity project, using store-bought assets and all, except they've taken the time to actually polish the game to make it look and feel nice. I can really appreciate that. I also feel like this might have been conceived as a touchscreen-based mobile game to begin with, but it's a decently pleasant one.

Too bad the game is just so slow-paced. Most of the game is spent watching the fox slowly trot from one square to another. It made the game so unpleasant to play. If the game had about twice as many levels, but moved about twice as fast, I think I would have been very happy with it.

4 / 10. I'd give this a neutral vote if Steam had one.