A Little to the Left

i so desperately wanted to like this game... i love cozy organizing games, so i love this in concept, but some key details about the gameplay made it more boring/frustrating than anything for me: - for most levels, it has the mobile game feel of "too much downtime". most of the puzzles are very quick to solve - many take less than a minute - and there's a disproportionate amount of time spent in between levels on the loading animations and such. the transitions are cute, but it feels like waiting in traffic when you just wanna enjoy driving your dang car. - the worst offender of this issue is the stupid cat... it was kind of cute at first, but it's weirdly confusing? when the cat is a "level", sometimes it's an unskippable animation, but sometimes it's a thing you have to interact with and the game doesn't always make it clear, so i'm sat there flinging my cursor around trying to figure out what i need to do to get back to the gameplay - but jk it's time to just sit there and watch some slow yawning animation. it stops being cute real fast, especially because there are levels where the cat actively messes with your progress. i went spelunking in the menus for a "disable cat shenanigans" option but alas, you must suffer. - the UI is juuuust unhelpful enough to be seriously annoying. for levels with multiple solutions, the only way to tell how many solutions you've found without backtracking to the level selection is to complete a solution and watch the stars pop up for a couple of seconds. that's not the biggest of deals, but i've got adhd so my working memory is hot garbage and i'm often watching a show or something while i play, so i kept finding myself needing to back out of a level to check my progress. also found it frustrating that once you find a solution, you have to fully restart the level to try a new one. in general, the progress tracking is clunky. - there are quite a few levels where you get a pile of items and the solution is to create some sort of symmetrical design, but the design can be freestyle. i wound up looking at user-written guides for these because i could NOT understand for the life of me how i was meant to figure out the precise arrangement of the items. the in-game hints make it look like there's a specific way to organize each item, but nope, it just needs to be symmetrical. very baffling since there are a lot of other puzzles where specific item placement does matter greatly. a "clue" to the symmetrical freestyles is that the items don't snap into place like they do in other puzzles... but other puzzles don't always have a clean snap either? the game mechanics could be so much cleaner... game designers i will give you a spare kidney for consistent snap mechanics please i am begging. - these daily tidy achievements have me crying... if you're a completionist/achievement hunter, avoid at all costs. i HATE having to reopen the game every day to play a "new" puzzle that only takes like 15 seconds to complete - and if you miss more than 2 days in a row, you lose your streak. i think in total you have to complete 100 total daily tidies and 30 consecutive daily tidies to get the achievement. i'm in purgatory. send help. i say all of this because the game came so close to being great, which makes the flaws very glaring. and there are a lot of elements i did enjoy! the drawer/cupboard organizer levels are SO so so so good, the sound design is very satisfying, the art is adorable... if the rest of the game felt a little sharper and more efficient, its solid qualities would've really had a chance to shine. i just couldn't get over the clunkiness and frustrations - there were too many for the positives to smooth over. and it's especially odd for a game that feels so tailored to a neurodivergent audience to have some key hangups like this. it's like a super comfy sweater with a scratchy tag in the back. :(

I enjoyed what little content the game provided, but the price to content ratio is unfair.