I really enjoyed this puzzle book! This was the perfect game to share with my currently long-distance partner over video call. We love doing puzzles together, and we had so much fun solving this last night.
We started off solving the word searches naively (though we definitely noticed some pieces of information that had yet to make sense) up until puzzle 7 when we started finding other words that matched the theme. By the time we had hit the rules page, we had already more or less figured them out and had started applying them to the later puzzles, but then we realized we had to fully redo the first two once the rules were fully internalized. I really like how you could play all of the searches naively but then realize you had done them completely wrong and then find new orientations for words you already found while re-doing them.
I thought the mechanic of alternating which text was read forward and backwards was very fun. We noticed some of the text flips very quickly, though it didn't all fully click until the very end. Super satisfying!
I thought it was awesome that we really had to use every detail to solve every last bit of the book. Noticing the little green highlight at the bottom of the puzzle 11 page really changed everything - previously, we weren't sure what those letters and numbers at the bottom meant. For a couple of the puzzles, we even had to start counting letters to figure out the missing blobs. We realized we had missed marking off just the single 'A' a couple times, which tripped us up, but all was figured out by the very end. :))
Overall, great mechanics, and it felt like there was a lot of cohesion across the puzzles despite the different themes. I liked how everything worked out with 12 words per puzzle (+ meta clue/puzzle 12 word). I think the blobs that were covering letters were used in interesting and creative ways, and I especially love how they were used in puzzle 1.
Thank you so much for making and sharing this!