Solas 128

Visually, Solas 128 looked like an interesting puzzle game. Rhythmic beams of light packets flow from map to map, and your goal is to figure out a combination of mirrors and other objects to bounce, combine, and separate the beams from their emitters to their receivers. There are some 150-plus little grid-based screens, each their own puzzle to a degree, but some also combining with adjacent ones to form a larger puzzle.

I played for about an hour, beating maybe a third of the levels. They get harder as the game goes on, but I'd guess the whole game still has several hours of puzzles, which is a nice amount. But what's not so nice is that the puzzles never got enjoyable. At first, there was a lot of freedom, so everything was too easy. Just place the mirrors in the right place and you win. But as the levels went on, there were more and more restrictions, which did make the process of finding the right solution harder, but they didn't make it more satisfying. To a degree, it felt like you could find every possible way to arrange things on the board, and eventually you just won.

It's difficult to make good puzzle games, but that's no excuse, and neither the presentation nor the puzzles themselves were particularly good here. Even as more mechanics are added, the game feels minimalistic. Even as the puzzles get difficult, your toolbox isn't large enough to feel like your solutions are anything of your own. It's 90% just a dry quest to find the board state that the developer intended, and I don't believe that makes for a fun game.