izigame.me

It really is a lovely little game in many ways, but doesn't click as a puzzle experience (yet) for me,
From my POV, the puzzle solutions seem very linear and prescriptive. It looks more freeform and creative in approaching solutions than it actually is, at least so far. It's not especially satisfying to finish a puzzle because there was not much room to do it any other way. And it's already a little annoying. The side-challenges turn it into an optimisation task that's a bit of a chore and has you hunting for the one pixel that knocks an extra 1 gold off the price of building the track. This takes up much more of your play time than any decisions you have to make, all of which are pretty obvious - if you have the info, that is. Often an earlier step in a puzzle can mean you have to effectively restart later, so you end up puzzling over the connections and solving it all as many steps up-front as you can manage. You kinda solve it on your mental drawing board, deploy your solution, then get thrown a building you weren't expecting and need to re-do. I've yet to have the satisfaction of an 'A-ha!' moment.
Also, this means lots of time staring at an empty, dead, desaturated landscape for a majority of your play time. The bits you connect get coloured in, but then you never need to look at those bits again, the next bit of the puzzle is over in grey land again, and so you never really have any reason to spend time looking at the pretty version you're activating. And the gfx are occasionally truly lovely to behold when you zoom in and pan around, but it all feels kinda static and lifeless in play. The main playscreen looks less charming than you might expect, most of the time it's going to feel like a zoomed-out Minecraft map sitting in grey space.
And it's turned out to be less fun than I had hoped. Levels take a while to play and the trial-and-error puzzles mean harsh reworking is likely. It's made me not want to play it again, because I can see as the levels are getting bigger this is becoming more of an issue, and life's too short to have to redo whole swathes of stuff, y'know? It's weird, it has loads of great ingredients and the devs deserve a lot of credit, you can see it's been created, cooked and delivered with love and charm, but ultimately the flavours don't really work together for me as an enjoyable dish.
Maybe that's just my tastes of course. Maybe the puzzles open up and become less prescriptive, with less clairvoyance needed as the game goes on, but I'm struggling to muster the enthusiasm to find out. I don't dislike it, but .... I've loaded it up the last couple times and just hovered over the start button on the map select screen and decided against it. Hoping future updates might expand the framework and offer modes more to my tastes because it's so appealing from the outside but it's just not a game I feel like digging further into at this point to find out if I can fall for it.