Tardy is a puzzle game with a story, driven by point-and-click adventure elements. In terms of content it's not a long game, maybe 5 or 6 hours if you want to read everything and don't get too hung up on any particular puzzle. I wouldn't feel bad paying the $7 ask price on Steam. I got it on sale on the Switch.

You play as Ramto, a delinquent of unspecified age who stows away aboard a spaceship in a cryopod somehow--don't think about it too hard--and wakes up to find the ship seemingly abandoned and drifting in space. He's trying to get home but he might just learn a few lessons along the way!

The game consists of moving from room to room, interacting with terminals that all have little logic puzzles to solve or little versions of classic video games to beat. As you proceed you learn more about what happened to the ship and what's going on in the galaxy generally.

It's a nice little story, although it makes no sense if you stop to think about why any of the elements hang together the way they do and you'll probably guess the ending immediately. The tone swings wildly between silly space adventure and sad reflections on loneliness and the futility of existence, and I am left wondering how the game is supposed to make me feel. As an example: In one room you are reading journal entries from a child who is slowly starving to death after every other inhabitant on his planet was killed by a robotic genocide, and then you have to solve a maze puzzle where you plug in a meat-microchip that wafts the scent of chicken through the duct work in order to entice a dog to hit a button you can't reach.

The puzzles are middling to good. Most of them I felt were over-burdened with hints, while a couple would have benefited from some additional explanation. These are not serious brain-busters for the most part, just figuring out how to put together the information you have or using the brute force adventure game tactic of using everything in your inventory on everything you can interact with.

A few puzzles were clearly designed with a mouse in mind but the Switch controls worked well for the most part.

Some elements of the experience could have used more polishing. The first time you open almost every terminal you have to click through a sequence of dialogue that talks about whatever you've just found before you're even allowed to see it--often, even after this is done, you'll still have to move someone's journal out of the way before you can even see what was being discussed. Some of the dialogue is hints and character-building but a lot of it could have been left out or at least trimmed down considerably. Occasionally some text will run outside the window it's supposed to appear in which renders it unreadable.

I liked the aesthetic. It invoked the feeling of a SpaceQuest game which I assume was intentional. I have mixed feelings about the fact that everything you can interact with has a little exclamation mark above it. The environments are pretty busy so if they weren't there I would undoubtedly be frustrated instead by trying to figure out what I was supposed to be paying attention to, but maybe something a little more understated would have done the job just as well.

A good effort. I enjoyed it for what it was.