Just reaching the ember statues could be a challenge in itself, blocked by puzzles or unique encounters with multi-step tasks. There was a big frog wanting food, a fisherman that could repair a butterfly net for me, luring a pig with a fruit so it could eat a carnivorous plant, raising platforms with treadmills, bringing orchid seeds to a cook, burning bushes with fire, connecting paths on a map, and much more.
At one point I acquired a lanthorn, which was a horn I could blow to invoke specific objects for moving them around like telekinesis, only while they were still touching the ground. I could move small islands I was standing on, or flipping blocks for closing gaps for me to walk past.
Everyone I met and exchanged dialog with, all notes I found in chests, even narrating while solving quests, was almost all voiced by just one girl. The voice acting itself was fine, but I was often wondering if the game would have been more enjoyable without all that chattering.
The camera was often static or on rails, instead of the usual behind-the-character. I always prefer the latter. In my opinion it is far superior to the former, which often introduce corners that are hard to see.
I tried to reach the chests for the challenges themselves, not for the contents of the chests. Each chest just had a humdrum note that didn’t really feel like a nice reward. I think the most apt description is meh.
Most puzzles were really easy, except for the odd ones out that were quite the opposite.
By far the worst was the puzzle where I had to walk on plates depicting frogs and turtles. There was some sort of order to figure out, but it never made any sense to me. I just kept brute forcing it until I got it right. Unfortunately, this meant falling to my death many times.
The one with two flip blocks and two block buttons also had me stumped for the longest time. There was something about it that just didn’t feel intuitive.
I also think the snake puzzles, dragging strings of blocks through pathways, were quite difficult. I really had to experiment a lot to get those right.
My conclusion to these surprisingly difficult puzzles is that it made the game feel uncomfortable to me. I was always wary of the next hardcore puzzle to appear in the ocean of kids puzzles. I really think the developers should have balanced this differently. Easy puzzles in the beginning, then steadily getting more difficult towards the end. You know – the way most games usually work.
A different kind were the pipe rotating puzzles. It was the usual trope. Grab a straight pipe piece, a corner piece, or a tee piece. Place where needed and rotate to continue the flow of energy. These puzzles could be complicated but didn’t feel difficult in the same way. It was just a little bit of fiddling and replacing. They should have made more puzzles like that instead of the painful lanthorn puzzles.
I always smiled at the way my ember sometimes got slowed down by a spider’s web for a second or two, after which it snapped and the normal run speed was back. Such a cute little detail.
I wasn’t too fond of how the boat was controlled using mouse and keyboard. It felt like the controls for the arrow icon was upside down. Later, I found it easier to just click a spot somewhere in front of the boat.
LOL at the green duck boat that builder robot made for me. Totally ugly – I liked it!
