izigame.me

The "10.000+ puzzles" claim that this game is advertised with is... Kind of misleading. There's indeed an enormous amount of puzzles, but of the 24 puzzle types in the game, several of them I'd argue don't deserve to be called "puzzles" at all (note: this review will thus contain spoilers for puzzle types).

For starters, 3 types of puzzles are time-based movement challenges. Calling these "puzzles" is equivalent to calling a time trial in a racing game a puzzle: at most you'll have to figure out the route you need to take, but often this is so trivial that I struggle to call these puzzles.

Then there are 3 types of puzzles that are simply "invisible" objects scattered across the world. These objects glitter slightly to make them visible and make a sound when you come close to them: you need to e.g. walk through them to "solve" them. There is barely any thought needed to "solve" these things, as again, they are barely puzzles. They are plentiful in the world, and of course scattering a bunch of these things across the entire map is a very easy way to inflate the game's puzzle count.

One type of puzzle requires you to match a fractal to an example fractal by using your mouse. It's unpredictable- or at least very difficult to predict- how the fractal reacts to the movements of your mouse, and in my experience it was quicker to randomly wiggle my mouse about than to actually try to solve and match the two images.

As for the other puzzle categories, some puzzle types are very simple and there is almost no depth to their mechanics.

Several puzzle types are perspective puzzles, with all of those being a variant of "stand in a particular spot and look in the right direction". These are often not very difficult, with it immediately being obvious where you should stand to make the puzzle work. There is no depth to these puzzles: a "Matchbox" type puzzle in the first game area and a "Matchbox" type puzzle from a late game area are practically indistinguishable. The only times where the game throws you some more variations of the theme are in enclaves or specific trials, but don't expect any in-depth iteration on mechanics here.

Arguably the strongest puzzle type of the game is found in the Logic Grids, which are sudoku-ish puzzles found across pretty much the entire world and have various rulesets. Solving one takes place on an entirely separate screen (think Witness puzzles): the vast, vast majority of them are completely detached from the world.

Arguably there is no reason why the majority of the remaining puzzles had to be scattered across an online open world. In fact, I don't understand why this had to be an online multiplayer game, which caused a lot of issues (e.g. performance issues). An offline mode as has been added was desperately needed, and also shows that this game did not need to be multiplayer in the first place (which probably would have saved the devs a lot of headaches). However, arguably the biggest multiplayer-related issue that was present in the game was the live service element, in which the puzzles in the overworld (not in e.g. enclaves) are all swapped out on a daily basis (meaning that if you get stuck on a puzzle, when you come back the next day it's suddenly not there anymore). There's no way to tell which of these puzzles you already solved or not, and bafflingly, this element also made it into the offline version of the game.

In general, if you like logic puzzles, you might like the logic grid puzzles, but for anyone looking for a more in depth puzzle experience I can't recommend this.