I wound up putting a fair bit of time into Quantum Conundrum today, almost completing one of the three wings, so it’s not going to be a terribly long game.

It’s common to compare it to Portal, as it’s the same kind of solve-a-puzzle-as-you-go-room-to-room, but with dimension shifting instead of portals.  One dimension makes things lighter, another one makes things heavier (and there are two others I hadn’t reached yet), and you might need to put items on a pressure plate and block a laser but you have to be careful about the order you do things in because the laser will destroy the item in the regular and light dimensions but you have to shift to the light one to move another item that would normally be too heavy, and fans will blow around items that are too light, etc.

The puzzles that require some thought are fairly interesting, but unfortunately there are some segments where you have to position items and then jump across on them, and the jump mechanics aren’t so good, making those segments a bit frustrating.  Overall though, I think it’s still good enough to come back and finish off at some point.

Yeah, I’ve been slacking a bit, going on vacation trips tends to derail whatever I’ve been working on at the time.  So, to get back into the swing of things, I checked out English Country Tune today.  I knew it was a puzzle game but wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but it turns out to be basically an advanced version of those Sokoban-like games.  Push items around a block maze to meet a particular goal, except with twists like gravity making the items drop, 3D aspects to the maze, ‘whales’ that run away from you and have to be pushed off the board, and so on.

The keyboard controls are a bit wonky due to how the direction you go in suddenly changes in spots when you move to a different orientation, and it’s sometimes hard to see parts of the level to see where valid places to move might be, but it’s a fairly interesting and challenging puzzler.  I wouldn’t sit down and play nothing but it, but I could see knocking off a puzzle here and there.

Today’s game is Stacking, and it’s a rather…different…one.  You’re in a world populated by Russian nesting dolls, and you have to complete various puzzles by stacking or unstacking yourself with other dolls to gain particular abilities useful in solving the puzzle.  It’s not particularly difficult, but it’s a nifty aesthetic, and there are some other things you can do like search for unique dolls or find multiple solutions to the puzzles.  I’ve done the first ‘world’ so far, and I think I will come back to this one later on.