After getting this huge bundle and kinda dreading going through all games to find what's good, your Akurra being one of the first games absolutely blew me away.
The GameBoy Advanced era of games is really dear to me, growing up without any pocket change and strict parents. The art style of Akurra but more importantly the rich animation, the amazing eye for detail in every puzzle, everything feeds back into this mindset of squeezing the most out of my games. The absence of language mimicks not knowing English as a native Dutch, bruteforcing your way through a game's inputs and letting the design lead the way.
I got invested pretty quickly in Akurra's starting puzzles, but when I reached the turtle at the end of the first island and I could see a Donkey Kong Country 3-like worldmap, it expanded my perceived scope of the game so much. Figuring out that the patterns on the ground were manually and deliberately placed, figuring out why two crates weren't pushable and imagining how they could be destroyed with a later item, then having everything fall into place was extremely satisfying. I've played a few puzzle games, but the sheer intelligent design going into these is something I had seen, but I had not experienced before.
Thank you so much for making Akurra!