I both love and loathe puzzle games. I enjoy the satisfaction of a well-built puzzle that doesn't require random guessing, but does necessitate a bit of brain-twisting to work out, and that elicits a really good "ah ha!" moment when you crack it. I hate being stuck. But it's a pretty good bet that if you put one in front of me, I'll have a go at it. Hence this one.
Remae has been dropped by magic into a fantastical realm which has a very Paper Mario aesthetic. This land is under a terrible curse, in that the lords of each of the world's three domains have been trapped away under a seal. It's all very Seven Sages.
Because Remae has been inducted into the Spiral Scouts on arrival into this world, she must collect badges in order to free them. As you might expect for a puzzle game, she gets a badge every time she solves a puzzle. Progression is based on collecting a certain amount. You can always bounce back to get ones you've previously missed. Luckily, she's got two scout masters to give her assistance.
The three realms, (Life, Death and Chaos), each have a different look to them, with Life being a pleasant pastoral area, Death being mostly graveyards and Chaos perhaps better labelled "Immorality", being as it is the land of sex, drugs and...EDM? (Its Sage also happens to be a tentacle monster.)
Fair play to the game, the puzzles are good. There's a couple that really stumped me, but when you work out how to solve them, there's not a one that feels unfair. We've got Sudoku style with colour matching, puzzles where you need to interpret awkward hinting signage, some Q-bert style tile modification puzzles and some nice pattern recognition. It's a range that's nearly as impressive as a Professor Layton title, with probably somewhere around the 50 mark. (There's also a few "after the end" ones to tidy up.)
There's a bit more wandering back and forth than you would usually expect, such that some of the puzzles feel a bit like they've been pulled out of a point and click adventure, where you've got to wander around with Item 1 to insert it into Slot B and so on. This does get occasionally tedious, but isn't a constant problem.
So, good puzzles, nice aesthetic, what could possibly go wrong? The answer is the dialogue. They've given the cutesy world an "adult" tweak by making everyone obsessed with rude words, shagging and arseholes. One of the early puzzles has you making literal "butt juice" in the special mixing lab. (Looks like an outhouse.)
The personalities you encounter run up and down the spectrum of amusing to terrible. Remae is an apathetic monster who doesn't really care if people live or die:
And the other characters are just as bad if not worse, with comedy alcoholism, sexual frustration, death by sex, names like "Taintleton", self-hating furries and a girl made of jelly who really wants her "back massager" returned. There's a few lines where the comedy hits, and it's actually pretty funny. But god, most of the time it's written like a twelve year old's idea of what adults might joke about. Imagine the dark age of comics. I persisted through the script because the puzzles are worth it, but I wish they'd just stuck to generic cheerfulness.
