Where Cards Fall (2019)

There's lots of little things that work with this game. The core puzzle mechanic involving creating card buildings to move around and get to the exit feels fresh and the way the cards move and react to mouse hover and input feels good.

In the story beats, I like how most other people are a dark blur, corresponding with how we don't remember more than a vague vignette of most people in our past save our good friends. And I like how the adults are illustrated with a pair of eyes in the walls, indicating the separation and their authority.

But there's lots of little and big things that drag this game down.

The core mechanic grows stale quickly due to repetition. I think the problem is either with the level design or the lack of subtle tutorialising, but after several levels I don't think I got a working understanding of the different principles involved in the puzzles. (Compare with Portal, which clearly states some core principles like momentum conservation.) So all levels blur together without a core concept that they teach or use. Each level is just another similar level to the previous one.

Also, character movement is full of annoyances, like the way it gets stuck in the geometry or how it moves to random directions after going up an incline or how the contextual jump is extremely unreliable.

Finally, the isometric POV doesn't work well in areas with multiple vertical levels, since it makes it really hard to intuitively judge the relative position and height of different elements.

On the story side, besides the presentation, it's just tedious and boring. After almost 3 hours of play and one or several story "cutscenes" after each puzzle, nothing of import has happened. So far the main character has had the most average and uneventful life you can think of. There's not a single beat of heighten emotions, nor any huge hurdle to overcome, nor any single reason for me to care about what happens next.

Played through this on Apple Arcade and there's lots I liked about this one, lots I didn't. On one hand, it's an extremely creative puzzler that plays on your spatial reasoning. It's extremely challenging, and has a good touch mechanic with pinching to construct and deconstruct card towers. Really clever central mechanic.

But it has a lot of quirks. Touching the screen also moves your character, and there's so many times where you go to pinch something and the character moves instead, totally setting back all of your progress on a puzzle. It also weaves a story throughout, but it's kind of difficult to really follow, despite seeming like a pretty textbook coming of age story. It also just draaaaaaags. The puzzle mechanic changes a bit throughout, but not enough to justify what felt like a 5 hour run-time. There's a ton of repetition. It just felt like I was doing the same kind of puzzle over and over.

It's getting a PC/console release, and I think the controls will help a lot to make it play smoother. It's a cool idea at its core, and worth checking out if you're on Apple Arcade. Very similar to a game like The Gardens Between.