Recent reviews by ShnitzelKiller

All too often, devs make really cool engine tech, but can't think of a good game to build around it. This is a rare perfect blend of cool technology used effectively to design fun, open-ended challenges. Despite the fact that everything is made of voxels, the developers put a lot of work into making the graphics really stellar (the fact that they're graphics nerds shows through in the names that appear in the game, like Frustrum, Gauss-Seidel and Path-Tracer), and lots of attention to detail that makes the missions more immersive, like the footsteps you leave in the snow and the impact craters that heavy objects make, using the technology to the fullest potential.
The missions have a lot of variation, so that the solution isn't always just to blow everything up that you see, which ensures that the physics can be used in unique ways to solve various problems and really gets its chance to shine.

One thing I do wish is that you could save and exit the game, since some missions take a very long time to set up. So expect to be able to finish a mission in one sitting if you start one up...

This game is very short. Having played a lot of free RPGMaker horror games in this vein, this one didn't really feel like there was much forward motion at all, with the entirety of the game only unlocking a few extra rooms in the mansion. Maybe it isn't fair to compare against Ib, but even the free original version of Ib felt much longer. Ib was quite a roller coaster ride, with multiple points of no return, where by the end it really felt like you went on a grand adventure with sympathetic characters. In Cat in the Box, you just solve a handful of puzzles, survive 2 or 3 distinct monster encounters, and it just ends (with a few immediate endings based on multiple-choice selections). I just kind of expected more out of a game of this type that costs actual money.

Depth seems to be alluded to but never explored (why is Schroedinger's Cat even mentioned? Why does she see her sister in the mansion?), and ultimately it doesn't seem like there's anything to this beyond the surface level of trying to escape the mansion. Maybe there is a hidden "true" ending route that is three times as long as the standard game (though I doubt it), but hunting for secrets when it feels like I already scoured everything in my first playthrough doesn't seem appealing at all.

How did they manage to make a grid-based puzzle game feel like it has floaty controls? Tapping a directional key too quickly will cause the character to half-step forward and then glide backwards into the previous tile he was standing on.
I guess this is what Jonathan Blow was talking about, how sokoban with real-time elements is a hard problem... and this isn't the solution.

cool I needed another method of destroying my mental health

The wand crafting in this game is incredibly versatile. There are so many different kinds of projectiles with wildly different properties, multiplied by all the different projectile modifiers and then by all the utility spells that allow you to basically program the sequence of operations that casting should entail.
For example, there is a modifier that makes copies of a spell orbit itself. I used this on a rock several times, and created a mass of swirling rotating rocks that ground up anything that touched it.
In general, there are lots of ways to exploit spells to get super fast or high damage wands, and it's really satisfying to put all the pieces together once you have them, where your wand goes from a crappy pea shooter to a wand that fires so fast that you fly around like a rocket.
The real skill you have to pick up to survive long enough to actually play with wands in a meaningful way is knowing intuitively what combinations will probably kill you unexpectedly. The pavlovian conditioning of losing all your progress by walking into your own plasma beam, or firing a dangerous spell with a perk that modifies trajectories unpredictably, is an important part of the experience.
Once you realize how powerful you can become in this game, it becomes very addicting to see how far you can get towards building the most broken overpowered character.
Without getting into spoilers, when you DO get to that point, there's a lot more to explore as well.

I've been having a lot of fun with this. The trailer had me thinking it was just a compilation of minigames from their previous games, but this basically contains three whole zachtronics-like games (the one where you grow flesh sculptures is a bit different in function and presentation, but still very complex and challenging). There's also a sudoku cartographer mini-puzzle game with 64 levels, three mini-games like in earlier titles (one of them is the one from Exapunks), and one sandbox hobby simulator where you paint gundams.
So if you liked earlier zachtronics games, this is a lot of bang for your buck imo. And apparently it's their last game, so I'm glad they ended on such a strong note.

Jonathan Blow should be forced to play this.

This is a very well-designed puzzle game. Like other great ones (Stephen's Sausage Roll, Baba is You), this game has thought of every possible consequence of its rule set, and designed puzzles incorporating all of them in mind bending ways. Everything you might possibly do in a world where boxes can be pushed into other boxes (including themselves) has been taken into account, leading to some fun situations where you'll discover something while solving a puzzle wrong, and possibly much later realize it was an intentional mechanic that can actually be used.

It's a bit on the short side, but the puzzles are often challenging, and extremely satisfying; solutions feel elegant most of the time, because so much can be done with so few pieces.

For those excited to play this in VR, best to wait until the game is finished, whenever that might be. I got up to the first quest I found, to scrub a window. The squeegee flew all over the place, regardless of how I moved my controller, and I was unable to do anything. Upon exiting the game, I found that I had to end the process to get it to quit. Also, for those with Valve Index controllers, expect the usual frustrations until community bindings are released that make clicking with the trigger behave sensibly - based on this, presumably Zuckerberg headset support was the main priority, so keep that in mind if you're hoping for timely fixes.

So to those wondering (and put off by all the youtuber fanboy reviews), no, this is not a game that was released in a working state.

It is a very polished VR game. It runs great and looks great, even on a mid-range card (RTX 2060 Super). The sound design is very good and responsive (friction and collisions all make sound, according to how much force you're using). The puzzles make very good use of VR interaction. You can really get a "feel" for how various contraptions work just by jiggling parts around. For example, if some part is locked in place and won't move, the game doesn't just make it so you can't interact with it. You can grab it, and even move it a tiny bit, and it will make sound when it gets stopped, so you know it's something that probably SHOULD move, but you have to unlock it somehow.

As for the puzzles themselves, they may not be the most difficult, but they are certainly interesting, and make use of very creative machinery, all of it modeled to an extreme level of detail from which you can try to logically deduce the operation or intended purpose. I didn't just breeze through it, and there were a good few "aha" moments. For a comparison, this is much more challenging, polished, and better designed than the VR game FORM, which doesn't go far beyond fitting shapes into holes.