I loved the atmosphere in this game! The background ambience/music really added to it. Playing as the drone with such an atmosphere made it kind of unsettling. There is a scary feeling as a human to imagine being a robot who is stuck in a "loop" of solving puzzles in such a cold, eerie environment, where the reward for solving is another puzzle but even harder.
The mechanic of using the insides of the boxes to solve the puzzles was interesting enough to keep me playing and keep my brain occupied. I liked that. Sorry that I will mention the atmosphere and worldbuilding again (but it's what I love the most about games...), I loved the mechanic also because it felt like I was basically shifting between different worlds and it gave a new perspective to both of them. By changing perspectives like that, it made it even more immersive.
I would really like to see this expanded, maybe adding more environment art and background to support the world-building.
I also kind of liked the way you have to undo moves until you get back to where you made a mistake. I can see how that can be frustrating when you have to really go back, but I liked the idea that you are maybe a drone that simply has a linear memory and has to go back step by step, instead of reloading a specific point immediately.
Great work!
Viewing post in Inscalar jam comments
Hey, thank you for such long and detailed feedback.
I can explain a little bit about the undo if you would like to have a little look behind the curtain:
It is like this both as a design choice, but also it has a technical factor. Basically, I don't expect many mistakes to be made more than ~5 moves before, as the game usually doesn't let you progress further if you made a mistake that long ago. This is however not true in the later parts of the game, where indeed you might've made a mistake ~20 moves ago. That being said, with the whole world being connected and continuous I can't just let player restart a level. In that case what would they even restart? Current cube that they are inside of? It can't be this way because the cube affects other cubes(worlds), so reseting just one doesn't really work. This could also lead to exploits where you can re-arange stuff inside of a cube, get out of it and then restart the level for it to fall into a position that it started at, which might not be available anymore due to some moves done.
Long story short: Due to the technical implementation and some design decissions, you can undo to the very start of the game which I think is super cool, but you have to do it move by move.