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11 reviews · 4 essays
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Counterpoint on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Lorelei and the Laser Eyes 9.0/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined four claims: one-button controls, never knowing where a solution lives, the monotony of combination locks, and unwarned strobing light. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Outer Wilds — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Outer Wilds 9.5/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined four claims: a loop that wastes your time, a story buried in text, painful ship controls, and unannounced horror. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Baba Is You — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave Baba Is You a 9.5/10. I sort five recurring negative-review patterns from Steam, Metacritic, and the critical press — the difficulty wall, the single-solution charge, variable explosion, frustration overtaking fun, and uneven difficulty between adjacent levels — and decide where I agree and where I push back.
The Lineage of Meta-Puzzles — When Rules Themselves Started Moving
Where did the idea of manipulating the rules themselves come from? A short genealogy from the single verb of Sokoban to the language of Baba Is You.
Related reviews
Void Stranger
A 2D Sokoban puzzler in which you lift a floor tile with a rod and set it down elsewhere, descending a forgotten labyrinth past traps and foes. From a handful of verbs grow bottomless puzzles and a hidden story — made by System Erasure.
puzzlesokoban-likemeta-puzzleChants of Sennaar
Climbing a Babel-like tower, you decipher the unknown logographic language of each floor's people from pictures and gestures. A game of observation and inference.
observationnarrative-puzzlemeta-puzzleAntichamber
A first-person puzzler in white walls and black lines that treats non-Euclidean space itself as a grammar.
observationmeta-puzzlefirst-personBlue Prince
A mansion roguelite where each day you draft the room behind the door.
logic-gridpathfindingmeta-puzzleLorelei and the Laser Eyes
In an eerie monochrome hotel, over 150 ciphers, numbers, and symbol puzzles weave through every floor.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleCOCOON
A world inside an orb, an orb inside that world, all the way down.
meta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleassemblyPatrick's Parabox
A textbook example of recursive Sokoban, structured as a master class in pedagogy.
sokoban-likemeta-puzzleOuter Wilds
Explore a solar system on a 22-minute loop and unravel the mysteries of an ancient race.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzleBaba Is You
A language Sokoban where you push the rules themselves around.
meta-puzzlesokoban-likeReturn of the Obra Dinn
A monochrome mystery where an insurance assessor must identify sixty crew and reconstruct their fates aboard a ghost ship.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleHer Story
Search a police database of live-action video clips to reconstruct the story of a missing husband. An FMV mystery.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzle
