Felix The Reaper

First Impressions

The first surprise in reading 468 Steam reviews is how much the two sides agree. Beautiful. Distinctive. A reaper who will not stop dancing. Narration by Patrick Stewart. Not one review, positive or negative, disputes any of that.

The split arrives in the next sentence. The positive side writes: underneath the look, there is a real puzzle game. The negative side writes: underneath the look, there is almost nothing. The sharpest phrasing comes from a negative review — style over substance.

The aggregate is 468 reviews across all languages, 340 of them positive, 73%, labelled Mostly Positive (snapshot 2026-09-06). The Metacritic score shown on the Steam page is 71. Numerically, it sits exactly where a divisive game sits.

But the fact of a split explains nothing on its own. What I went looking for were the places where both sides name the same thing differently. The answer, up front: the argument collapses into one question — where this game decided to put its strictness.

Felix The Reaper in play — the first image listed on the Steam store page — Steam store screenshot

The World

The first words the positive side reaches for are almost always about the look. Art style, animation, macabre, oddly charming. Some reviewers recommend the game on the strength of the dancing reaper alone, and many single out the pairing of the animation with its gallows humour.

What is interesting is that the negative side concedes the same point. The jibe that ninety percent of the budget went to the graphic designers is, read the other way, a statement that the visuals are faultless. On art and sound, all 468 reviews effectively agree.

Translated into design terms: this game owns the player's first impression completely. But owning it also raises the bar the game has set for itself. The moment the surface says 'densely made', the player expects the board to be dense too. The size of the disappointment in the negative reviews comes from that gap.

Felix The Reaper in play — the second image listed on the Steam store page — Steam store screenshot

Putting the Mechanics into Words

The verb list is remarkably short. Felix may only walk in shade. You flip the sun between two positions to reshape the shadows. You push, or pull, an object. That is essentially all of it — and the store copy itself names Sokoban, Monument Valley and Hitman GO as its skeleton.

When the positive side says 'simple but makes you think', this is what it means. In Puzzlebyrinth's terms it is thoroughgoing subtraction of verbs. Like Closure, it converts light and shadow from decoration into walkability itself. A shadow here is not a picture. It is floor.

The negative complaint — that it comes down to moving a box from A to B — points at the same structure. Two verbs: the positive side calls that clean, the negative side calls that thin. Same object, different name.

The hinge, as I read it, is that the sun has only two positions. There is no combinatorial explosion, but the search space is small and the solution tends to collapse to one. The recurring negative note that levels are single-solution is the reverse face of that decision. Pushed far enough, subtraction starts removing the player's choices too.

Felix The Reaper in play — the third image listed on the Steam store page — Steam store screenshot

Feel of the Controls

The single most reproducible complaint on the negative side is not about the puzzles at all. It is about the controls: narrow click hotspots, a camera that does not rotate the way you meant, a general clunkiness with the mouse. The same three turn up in reviews years apart.

The telling part is that recommenders write it too. One recent positive review lists its grievances with the camera and the clicking at length, then closes by saying there are genuinely interesting puzzles underneath, and recommends it anyway. The complaints match. Only the tolerance differs.

In design terms this is a problem of observation resolution. When an isometric board must be read through a moving sun and a rotating camera, understanding the board is itself an act of input. Where Monument Valley made the perspective trick the spectacle, here perspective falls onto the chore side of the ledger.

When a player is stuck, do they doubt their reading or their hands? Take away the ability to tell those apart and difficulty stops converting into learning. Most of the irritation on the negative side, I think, comes from exactly that failure to separate the two.

Felix The Reaper in play — the fourth image listed on the Steam store page — Steam store screenshot

The Texture of Difficulty

Sort the testimony about difficulty and it falls into three piles: (a) it is simply hard and I got stuck, (b) it is not hard, it is laborious, and (c) it is made hard by the grading. Note that (a) crosses the line — some reviewers say their brain turned to mush and still recommend it.

Pile (c) is the unusual one. Levels are graded on moves and time, and achievements hang off that grade. One negative review calls it a shallow attempt to bolt on replayability. A design that wants you to experiment and a scoring system that demands the shortest route are pulling in opposite directions on the same screen.

Difficulty has kinds. The difficulty of reading a situation, the difficulty of exhausting your options, and the difficulty of satisfying a rubric are three different things. The complaints here concentrate on the third. Designing difficulty means deciding what a stuck player will suspect.

Some reviews cite completion rates — that only a small fraction finish what is roughly a four-hour game. The figure comes from Steam achievement statistics, so I would not lean on the number itself, but the impression that many people step off partway is consistent with both sides. Reported clear times scatter between about four and eight hours.

Felix The Reaper in play — the fifth image listed on the Steam store page — Steam store screenshot

Reviews Consulted

This piece was written from the Steam store page's user reviews as of 2026-09-06. No review text is quoted directly; recurring claims are reconstructed instead.

・Steam: Felix The Reaper (Mostly Positive, 340 of 468 reviews positive, 73%)

・Read via WebFetch: the top 10 helpful positive reviews, the top 9 helpful negative reviews, and the 6 most recent reviews

・Product facts (developer Kong Orange, publisher Daedalic Entertainment, released 2019-10-17, Metacritic 71) come from the public data on the Steam store page

Closing

From a design standpoint I give it 6.5. That lands close to Steam's 73%, but I get there differently. My deduction is not that the puzzles are shallow. It is that the strictness was put in the wrong place.

The store copy calls the game challenging and strict, and that is accurate. The trouble is what the strictness was aimed at: not thinking, but input and scoring. The central invention — turning shadow into floor — is good, and the subtraction of verbs is coherent. What is a shame is that the harshness leaks outside that skeleton.

So the audience is clear enough. If you are drawn in by the look and the narration and can take it as a four-to-eight-hour short work, it holds up. If you arrive expecting a board you can read quietly, the way Lara Croft GO lets you, the controls will trip you before the puzzles do. And if walking on shadows is reason enough, the lower quarter of that 73% will not concern you.

Felix The Reaper in play — the sixth image listed on the Steam store page — Steam store screenshot