Wow. An entire essay for a game that’s fundamental premise is so simple. Your review on the game is almost exactly that of what an onlooker would say. Edit: my own opinion on 2 things 1) look/sound of game. All games have their quirks and those are what make a game different than the next. Though when a games graphics make the game seem like it was thrown together in a week or two, it just doesn’t seem worth it to play. This game though, seems like it had effort put into the graphics. It might not have been much but that’s what makes it somewhat unique. But hey. I don’t watch aliens rock or play puzzles games because of how they look. I play them because they challenge me to think outside the box 2) about choice of buttons and saves By not having undo/reset buttons it adds a new difficulty to this simple game by allowing it to seem easy to complete, but will actually be much harder. By having a reset/undo button people can just carelessly try every combination without having to go through much effort when they may get stuck… this game though, has checkpoints everywhere so a reset/undo button doesn’t do much.

I personally think no undo is an intentional part of the game as its only up to 5 steps after any "checkpoint". I do think there should be a way undo an entire move sequence to a check point and the fast travel.

while I agree you should be able to go back to any room, I think going back to main checkpoints is good enough. Didn’t see you use it in the video, but if you hit Q in the pause menu, you can select certain bases to teleport to. it didn’t look like you really understood the section right at the ending because maybe you didn’t pay enough attention. At the end, the path to laika was blocked off by a gate that opened after you got the 6 stars. there’s a “bad” ending if you leave before then which makes you go back for the star puzzles with the double respawn tech. since the last star you got was the one near the end, the gate to laika immediately opened and it didn’t even seem like you knew it was blocked in the first place. I think the low quality artstyle is intentional, although I do agree on the sound design being poor. There is a button that restarts the room in the pause menu, and having a restart to checkpoint button defeats the purpose of the puzzles where you have to find a way to die, maybe an undo to checkpoint would work but there might also be problems. I also think not having an undo was also good, yeah it was punishing at times but I liked it because of that, it makes the player understand what they’re doing. If you have an undo, after anything goes wrong, you just say no and it’s magically fine. It makes the player think of the solution as a whole rather than the segmented trial and error “what do I do from here? Oh no that was wrong, undo, next option.” you force the player to understand why it was wrong. For me, it’s only an 8/10 mostly because of the lack of content rather than flaws. none of the mechanics or puzzle types felt too complex or overdone to the point they weren’t fun anymore but it left a lot of cool ideas underdeveloped, which I get because there’s a (hopefully longer) sequel that’s going to build off of that. the artstyle is low effort enough to be “bad” in a cute way, music and sound effects could be improved, but at face puzzle-solving value, it’s super unique and packs so many ideas into such a short amount of time, especially the hidden double respawn mechanic which feels like a bug they made into a gameplay option. short and sweet, can wait for the next one.

"it looks and sounds like crap" is kinda funny but is also a thing that needs to be said, i know a lot of people say that gameplay is what matters and not visuals/sound, esp in such a mechanic and design focused group as puzzle game community, but visuals (and sound) are part of design and experiance and can be very important as they matter in conveying information and many other things, alongside baseline enjoyement of a game (looking at smth u like to look at is generally more enjoyable than looking at smth u think is ugly, even if the gameplay is good). dont get me wrong, i by no means am saying that every game needs to be 4k ultra high rez with realistic physics and raytracing to be good on that front, stylisation is a powerful tool and many low spec graphical styles exist (also same for sound but i know less about sound design than i know about visuals)

@@tiaanvanrensburg1032 there are ways to do low graphical fidelity without looking bad or poor, intentional or not doesnt really make much of a difference, if you choose to do smth bad intentionally it's still bad. Baba also has a low graphical fidelity but looks a lot better imo

Tyler never changes rooms, wdym? 😁

Fr fr more channels should take notes of alienrock's editors my primary language is not rnglish but i can comprehend very well but sometimes i cant understand and they are always highlighting what he is talking about it helps me so much with contexts on what the hell is going on. Channel criminally under-rated need more subscribers

@@destroything The space above Tyler's webcam video, it changes based on the color of the game room he is in.

Wow i didn't even notice it wasn't part of the game

@@destroything hmmm. What’s grass?

Too bad technology hasn't advanced far enough to let us play games that are both fun and look good haha

​@@Aliensrockwhat about islands of insight?

To be fair, I've always thought that with less complicated graphics comes more freedom to make things interact without necessarily having to make a visual representation for every single interaction. Look at something like Dwarf Fortress for a famous example of that - that game started on ASCII letter/number graphics, and being restricted in that way allowed the developer to spend most of the time actually figuring out not only the gameplay, but also the level of simulation that would go into supporting it. I'd share one of the infamous bug reports as a further example of just how complicated that game is, but for the life of me I can't remember the story.

@@cainprescott4937 my guess is probably the dead cats one?

The best puzzles have a simple premise and a clever complication...love seeing this game

Yeah, it"s super cool! I noticed right away, a little sad Tyler missed on what it was

That's really cool. It's always awesome when a puzzle game does that.

Did not notice! Neat.

yeah when n step steve first came out i saw it on coolmath games and assumed it would be a short, basic puzzle game. I was not expecting the level design to make me question everything I knew about puzzle games. Absolutely phenomenal.

A certified classic Numberphile video

I believe Steve was sent as a rescue crew.

Steve is a rescue kitten, sent after Laika's ship crashed. He's not part of the original crew. It's described in the story at the beginning of the game that Tyler skipped.

@@Knyckoh oh, that makes much more sense

@@Knyckoh How did they plan on having Steve come back?

Do not even try to get any stars in these games, it will only drive you crazy

I was more of a Kongregate player myself hahahaha

It was the other way around, actually! The initial release of Baba was two months before this game.

Played it in my own time, thought it was a truly magical game.

​@@Aliensrock glad you enjoyed it! Quickly became one of my favorite games of all time

Trust me, you’ll either like it hate it or both