I'm stuck on shard X5... can someone provide me with an answer to this hint: is the solution symmetric about the diagonal from the top-left to the bottom-right? I've been working under this assumption but I've had so little success I'm beginning to have doubts.
Wow, finally solved it. Actually even though I was only searching for symmetric solutions, the solution I ended up with is not symmetric... ridiculously difficult puzzle.
With that I 100%'d the game, I think. Besides unlocking the locked portion of the outro sequence, are there any other secrets I should be looking for after completing all the bonus X-levels?
Completed it all but Pylon X. This is a really solid puzzle game with great progression. The little stories were better than the fluff I expected.
My opinion, this game definitely suffers rather than benefits from being sokobon style in the puzzle sections. Exploring the gardens by grid movement was was fine, but I would have rather dragged and dropped stuff in puzzle zones even if it was on rails with collision. The movement is also choppy in the web app and I found myself undoing a lot. I eventually became resentful the "dead" time that felt wasted shoving stuff around in the harder puzzles just to get to the point of where I could try solutions, especially shard and spire. For spire, I stopped trying solutions in game entirely and mapped using Simon Tatham's black box puzzle app.
Frustration with the sokoban mechanics aside, I enjoyed Shard. That was a new system for me. And the puzzle simply looked good.
Spire was grueling in a math way. Lot of great designs in the mid-late stages. The X ones were an enumeration of all the mathematically possible solutions.
Totem was kind of long but some of the puzzles were just demos, and overall the puzzle design was really well thought out. This one felt like it had the most love put into it. I replayed this one because it was pretty neat.
I am a huge fan of set, so Glyph was a breeze but I really liked the later puzzles in that pack.
Pylon was difficult. I really wish there were show lasers pieces instead of trees at the borders for the later puzzles because the bouncing got really busy with the splits and turns. The cycle of screenshotting, plotting, and then playing unfun sokobon to readjust a piece convinced me the X puzzles weren't going to be worth it.
I agree that the sokoban-ness can cross the line into tedium, especially with levels with a lot of moving parts or limited spaces. Halfway through development I had second thoughts about the direction the game had headed when I realised that more than half of the levels could technically just be drag-and-drop! Ultimately I think I wanted to keep the feeling of moving through the world, and maintain the foundational idea of a sokoban where the final placement is the puzzle instead of the path to get there.
Amusing side note, the first test version of Shard was horrifying with how tedious it was to move everything around (back before the yellow 'x' tiles were added to increase the play space), so I'm very glad my testers shook some sense into me, resulting in me reworking the entire area haha.
Happy to hear you enjoyed Totem, that one definitely went through the most iterations to make sure that the tutorialisation and difficulty curve felt right. And glad that the epitaphs felt worth reading, I almost left them out entirely a week before release because I wasn't sure if they quite worked!
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
could anyone by chance give me a hint as to how to find the code for the abyss levels for totem? its the only one I don't have yet
I'm stuck on shard X5... can someone provide me with an answer to this hint: is the solution symmetric about the diagonal from the top-left to the bottom-right? I've been working under this assumption but I've had so little success I'm beginning to have doubts.
The originally intended solution is symmetrical about the diagonal, yep! Though some people have managed to find some asymmetrical solutions as well.
Ok, that's reassuring, thanks.
Wow, finally solved it. Actually even though I was only searching for symmetric solutions, the solution I ended up with is not symmetric... ridiculously difficult puzzle.
With that I 100%'d the game, I think. Besides unlocking the locked portion of the outro sequence, are there any other secrets I should be looking for after completing all the bonus X-levels?
Yep you've finished it all, the stuff after the locked gate in the outro is the only extra bit of content to unlock :) Congrats on 100%!
Completed it all but Pylon X. This is a really solid puzzle game with great progression. The little stories were better than the fluff I expected.
My opinion, this game definitely suffers rather than benefits from being sokobon style in the puzzle sections. Exploring the gardens by grid movement was was fine, but I would have rather dragged and dropped stuff in puzzle zones even if it was on rails with collision. The movement is also choppy in the web app and I found myself undoing a lot. I eventually became resentful the "dead" time that felt wasted shoving stuff around in the harder puzzles just to get to the point of where I could try solutions, especially shard and spire. For spire, I stopped trying solutions in game entirely and mapped using Simon Tatham's black box puzzle app.
Frustration with the sokoban mechanics aside, I enjoyed Shard. That was a new system for me. And the puzzle simply looked good.
Spire was grueling in a math way. Lot of great designs in the mid-late stages. The X ones were an enumeration of all the mathematically possible solutions.
Totem was kind of long but some of the puzzles were just demos, and overall the puzzle design was really well thought out. This one felt like it had the most love put into it. I replayed this one because it was pretty neat.
I am a huge fan of set, so Glyph was a breeze but I really liked the later puzzles in that pack.
Pylon was difficult. I really wish there were show lasers pieces instead of trees at the borders for the later puzzles because the bouncing got really busy with the splits and turns. The cycle of screenshotting, plotting, and then playing unfun sokobon to readjust a piece convinced me the X puzzles weren't going to be worth it.
Thanks for the feedback!
I agree that the sokoban-ness can cross the line into tedium, especially with levels with a lot of moving parts or limited spaces. Halfway through development I had second thoughts about the direction the game had headed when I realised that more than half of the levels could technically just be drag-and-drop! Ultimately I think I wanted to keep the feeling of moving through the world, and maintain the foundational idea of a sokoban where the final placement is the puzzle instead of the path to get there.
Amusing side note, the first test version of Shard was horrifying with how tedious it was to move everything around (back before the yellow 'x' tiles were added to increase the play space), so I'm very glad my testers shook some sense into me, resulting in me reworking the entire area haha.
Happy to hear you enjoyed Totem, that one definitely went through the most iterations to make sure that the tutorialisation and difficulty curve felt right. And glad that the epitaphs felt worth reading, I almost left them out entirely a week before release because I wasn't sure if they quite worked!