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(9 edits)

That was a puzzle all right. I liked the simple visuals and the controls were snappy. Also enjoyed the slightly vague button tutorials, wanna do something like that for one of my games now >:)

Having a save system was much appreciated. It sadly didn't help much in the later levels (where I needed it the most) since it didn't save the single-press buttons' states and broke buttons if saved with a box on them. Also would put the save and load buttons further from each other, it's very easy to mispress K instead of L and lose all your progress.  The buttons (at least the reset button) didn't work when I switched to a different language keyboard layout.

Explicitly telling the player that they softlocked themselves was pretty odd? More then once it acted as a straight up hint, and when it didn't, I knew that I softlocked myself without the text anyway. Also the softlock notification didn't disappear upon loading a save.

The levels were extremely hard to parse visually, which is somewhat integral to the mechanic I guess. You could preview the next aberration state with like 30% opacity at all times, not sure it would look good and/or understandable though, just an idea. Buttons could have been different for when they need a box and a single press, that's probably the biggest easily fixable problem. Could have been some portal-style background lines to show which button activates what.

The person below provided very good criticisms which I agree with completely so I'll try to not repeat what they said too much. The mechanic you came up with is pretty elegant and provides plenty of depth, I liked it; I didn't like the levels very much. The way I enjoy puzzles the most is when they have a tiny space with a small amount of possible permutations, focused on a single cool mechanical idea that makes me go "aha!" when I figure it out. This game had me go "oh, finally" when I solved a level. Instead of letting me experience a cool consequence of a mechanic, the game added five layers of complexity on top of it, making me completely overwhelmed, especially with already being fundamentally hard to parse due to the core mechanic. If I was making it, I would try to make every level as small as possible while keeping the singular thing that I find fun about the level. There's a good GDC talk that describes that for a bit. 

The last mechanic with invisible colors is smart and could be nice in theory but it didn't work out well for me in the game; I didn't understand it at all in the introductory level and the last level wasn't satisfying to solve, felt somewhat like a chore to figure out. Also it obviously adds to the problem of levels being hard to visually parse.

This review is very critical but I did play for one and a half hours and beat it so clearly the game did something right! It is clever and made me proud of solving it. I also liked the dog in the end. Great job and good luck with your future games!

(+1)

Very true, and thanks for playing!!, there's a lot i would change if i redid this or expanded upon this, which i doubt i will do.

so many mechanics are really finicky due to being my first game and my lack of knowledge of godot(boxes being able to be pushed through one tile gaps, the horrible, terrible way i made the platforms move which made so many things more complicated, save states and buttons in general), this has however sparked my motivation for gamedev again and i plan to use that for my first non jam game, thanks for linking that talk aswell, i checked some information on puzzle design but i barely was able to use it with my experience, time and overthinking.

thanks again and i also wish you the best with future games!