Beat almost the entire demo, except level 19.
This is an interesting puzzle game. It has fantastic art, very snappy controls and a great atmosphere.
The levels themselves were simple since they all felt like tutorials. The puzzle mechanics however are on the convoluted side of things, even a simple house has a boatload of requirements. Later levels could become overwhelming if the player has to keep track of too many things at the same time. Pools and prisms are hard to wrap your head around, specially when I had to use them to "extend the keep". I always screwed something up and had to retry. The chess position notation helped a bit, but it still felt like guesswork. Mirrors were difficult too until I realized they only repaired houses, I imagine they have more uses later on.
Speaking about buildings, building a house is a lot of work. More than it should.
- Move mouse to the bottom, click the cut icon
- Move mouse to the meadow, click it to make dirt
- Move mouse to the bottom, click the timber pile icon
- Move mouse to the dirt, click it to make a timber pile
- Move mouse to the bottom, click the house icon
- Move mouse to the timber pile, click it to make a house
- Realize the timber pile is not next to the garden
- Restart the level
Doing this once is not an issue, but failing a level and having to do this again and again is tedious. I know about the hotkeys, but the player shouldn't learn three different hotkeys to build the most basic structure of the game. Why not just let the player place a house directly on a meadow? Cemeteries work like that after all. Hell, make it spend 3 actions if you want a similar resource cost (cut/build/build). Same applies to the mason and a bit to the gardens.
I didn't understand cementeries. Even having three felt like they did nothing and houses started falling apart for seemingly no reason. Sometimes I clicked on a tile to know what it was reflecting, used a tool somewhere else and the tile info remained on the screen. Text in general is hard to read and the pop up window with info sometimes appears behind the bottom bar. When having the cut tool selected, it would be cool to have an indication of what is going to be harvested before clicking a tile.
The premise of this game is very cool and I had a lot of fun going through the levels. It will be interesting to see how the game plays in later levels after all the mechanics have been teached.