Sands of Hope

I really wanted to like this one. The music, visuals, and character/environment design are great, and the genre (puzzle/exploration) is one of my favorites. But I just couldn't get into it for a number of reasons, all centered around the base mechanic: 1) There are some major underlying issues with the physics, with blocks clipping into each other, not attaching to the surface you want, or worse. 2) The puzzle designs are just very shallow. No puzzle ever really felt more than just "build a bridge". Combined, I spend most of my time (out of the 60 mins it took me to reach the end) fighting with the physics and not really engaging with the world/exploration/puzzles. I wish the devs the best with their future work, as the art style and direction were clearly there, but the mechanics and gameplay could've used more time to cook.

[h2]Beautiful world and artstyle, but the game suffers from serious physics jank[/h2] I really tried to like this game, but the movement and physics just ruined my experience. First 10 minutes I ran into a gamebreaking bug, which broke my save as well. The way cubes, assets and characters interact with each other is just so amateurishly jank, the movement and controls, especially with the cubes are awkward, unintuitive and cumbersome, glitching the game often in unintended ways. The rotatable isometric view is not helping here. It is just not fun to manually adjust all the time to give you the best view. The fastest way to get around is not your vehicle, but abusing a bug (?) with standing on top a cube and moving yourself wth it. The dog is unnecessary and just gets in the way. Give me a shovel and let me do the digging. And the core gameplay? Nothing to write home about either. Just build bridges from A to B with cubes, and RPG elements sprinkled around the world.

I really wish I could recommend this game, because it does have a lot going for it. The world design is interesting, I like the art style, and the sound effects/music are amazing. Unfortunately, the core mechanic of the game is so unbelievably frustrating to play. You manipulate these magnetic cubes that attach to one another to reach areas, build bridges, etc. However, the physics of the cubes seem to never do what you actually want to do. The puzzles themselves are quite simple, but actually getting the mechanics to do what you want without the physics completely messing you up and glitching out is a completely different story. If they make significant QOL updates to the controls here, I would absolutely return to this game. Unfortunately, the ~hour I spent in this game was frustrating due to the poor physics & controls, despite how interested I am in the world & story.

pretty good