At least in the puzzle genre, the best games are often the simplest, and 12 word searches shows this principle really well. This honestly might be one of my favorite games of all time, and it's not even a video game. Every puzzle is so well crafted, from the base puzzles tricking you into thinking you know the rules to the meta puzzles that have been there since the beginning. I would put this up there with the likes of baba is you and n-step steve. I can't put into words how much I love this game. wait actually, I probably could.
Firstly, the page telling you to go through each page carefully in the order given, only to find the misplaced rules page telling you to complete it in any order was hilariously smart.
Second, the amount of "I thought I knew this was true but actually wasn't" moments was astounding for a 16 page pdf. every single twist and turn was mind-boggling.
Third, the small details made it 100 times better. the way QUESTIONMARK made a question mark and that the little dude on the very first page was a pictogram clue was super charming and added to it tenfold.
Although, there were a couple issues that I ran into. I see a lot of people talked about the double zodiac thing, personally I didn't mind that. What I did mind was CATEGORIES and LEFTOVERS. As far as I could see, you just had to stumble upon the right letters in the right order to get these. There wasn't a super obvious theme to those ones like the other ones had and I ended up having to find a playthrough to get these ones (thank you Joe Plays Puzzle Games). Another thing that I stumbled a bit on was figuring out the rules from the rules page. there was a bit of confusion as to whether the rule was you can't have overlap, you can't have straight lines, or both. eventually I got it, but it was a little rough.
Fantastic game overall. This really takes me back to messing around with the kids menus at restaurants, trying to find "secret" words in the 5x5 crossword puzzle. This really shows the "ah-ha" genre of puzzle game in a very simple way that I think anyone can get behind and not find very confusing. This is a 10 out of 10 game in my eyes and I'm recommending it to all my friends.