This game attempts to give the player an experience of discovering the mechanics on their own through experimentation and exploration.
This is Not what happens. The game is filled with things that you can only learn through looking at the completely gameplay-disconnected hints screen and then only achieve through immense trial and error, simply guessing what the creator intended. Meanwhile the emergent gameplay is few and far between; everything executes a specific hardcoded function that doesn't have too much interaction with other features, and it's very difficult to discover these in a natural way. The worst part? There are a few specks of that kind of gameplay. I won't mention them here because I still wanna respect spoilers and all, but if you've played you probably know what I'm talking about.
I think in an ideal world, to achieve what this game set out to do, youd want to have lots of simple, easy to discover mechanics, as well as maybe a few obscure mechanics that you can find through more experimentation, each of these mechanics weaving together in interesting ways that allows the player to create completely unique designs using all the principles they discovered.
How Not to do discovery-based gameplay.
This game attempts to give the player an experience of discovering the mechanics on their own through experimentation and exploration. This is Not what happens. The game is filled with things that you can only learn through looking at the completely gameplay-disconnected hints screen and then only achieve through immense trial and error, simply guessing what the creator intended. Meanwhile the emergent gameplay is few and far between; everything executes a specific hardcoded function that doesn't have too much interaction with other features, and it's very difficult to discover these in a natural way. The worst part? There are a few specks of that kind of gameplay. I won't mention them here because I still wanna respect spoilers and all, but if you've played you probably know what I'm talking about. I think in an ideal world, to achieve what this game set out to do, youd want to have lots of simple, easy to discover mechanics, as well as maybe a few obscure mechanics that you can find through more experimentation, each of these mechanics weaving together in interesting ways that allows the player to create completely unique designs using all the principles they discovered.